Reading Diary
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Im Westen nichts Neues
Also known as “All Quiet on the Western Front” in English. I was inspired to read this book by the 2022 film adaptation winning several Oscars and landing on my t-watch list. But because I prefer reading books first, then watching film adaptations in chronological order, I had to read this first, then I will watch the 1930 film (which also won two Academy Awards), and then finally the 2022 one.
I was a bit afraid of reading a long novel written in 100-years-ago German, but the language was actually quite approachable, except for military terms and slang, of which there was plenty.
The story is about a group of young German boys sent to fight on the Western front in WWI and how their souls get crushed and most of them killed. The depiction of the horrors of war are detailed and very vivid, which makes this a rather disturbing read. This actually makes me a bit afraid of watching it on film.
Anyway, a great classic everyone should read, and fuck war!
Bought DRM free on Beam.
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Die fünf Seelen des Ahnen
I stumbled upon this book while looking for science fiction novels originally written in German. Turns out that Die fünf Seelen des Ahnen, which translates to something like “The five souls of the ancestor” is the only novel written by a woman that won the German Science Fiction Award (Deutscher Science Fiction Preis) so I felt obligated to give it a go. (What terrible bro parties these literary awards can be…)
The story is about an ark ship that’s more like a big city with a sophisticated society landing at a potentially habitable planet (after a bit of terraforming, because it’s entirely covered by an ocean) and then getting in contact with the beings living there.
I did like the world Nolte built on the ship, with all the weird things the bored passengers do in guilds, the way they avoid overpopulation, politics, oppression. Many things quite Earth-like but with a huge twist.
I can’t say however that the story was thrilling, I think the emphasis was more meant to be on the dynamics of inter-personal and trans-civilizational relationships.
The prose was easy to read, perfect match for my German skills.
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Véres Balaton
Könnyű olvasmány, kb. 3 este alatt kivégeztem. Szocreál-retró hangulatú “elvtársazós” krimi, jól hozza az atmoszférát anélkül, hogy eröltetett lenne.
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Children of Memory
Had high hopes for this book, the third in the Children of Time series as I really liked the first two. This is a good book, but nowhere near as good as the first two.
From now on, whenever I see corvids, I will definitely look at them differently. The ambiguity about their sentience was a nice touch, and the discourse about what’s sentient and what is not towards the end of the book is a great summary of this problem. Are we humans just very sophisticated computing machines?
Bought DRM-free on Kobo.
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Altered Carbon
I only finished reading this book because I recently did not finish some other books. But I did not like it. Crime story in the San Francisco of a far-future earth featuring a superhero named Takeshi Kovacs from a human colony of a distant planet.
What did I not like? Almost everything. The prose is not great, the story hard to follow (what was “resolution something something” again?), the protagonist is more like an action movie character laughably indestructible, way too much pointless raw violence.
There is one very detailed sex scene where I almost gave up on the book. I don’t despise pornography in general, but if I want porn, I reach for porn, if I want science-fiction, I reach for science-fiction. This was the wrong crossing of borders. (There are a few other minor distasteful crossings of this border. I really don’t want details about erections of any characters.)
Few things I liked. The concept of transferring identities between human and synthetic bodies and the problems that might and did arise. Takeshi’s home town being called “Newpest”, which is a real district of Budapest where I grew up. (Kovács is also a very common family name in Hungary.) Having spent some months in San Francisco, it was fun to see some places I know in the story. The “rust coloured suspension bridge”, or Potrero, that is now called Licktown and is a slum.
A quote I liked:
Course, with Understanding Day, the whales were suddenly big money for anyone who could talk to them. You know they’ve told us almost as much about the Martians as four centuries of archaeologues on Mars itself. Christ, they remember them coming here. Race memory, that is.
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The Left Hand of Darkness
I had high hopes for this book after reading The Dispossessed but it ended up being a flop. I bailed out at 54%.
The pitch about a society where people have no fixed gender really got me excited but this theme does not unfold in the story in any interesting way. The fact that pretty much everyone is a “he” by default is annoying even (I know, I know, it was written in ‘69, gender neutral language was not invented yet).
Other than this gender thing, nothing else happens that would have kept me engaged. There is a cold planet named Winter and an envoy (sort of an ambassador) from the rest of the worlds that already form a union and this guy struggles to convince Winter to join.
Places, people and things have annoyingly hard to remember names, sometimes multiple. For instance “Mishorny. Streth Susmy.” is a place and date opening a diary entry.
A few quotes I liked:
On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stumbled upon this book after watching Lamb and researching what other movies Noomi Rapace has played in.
An extremely long but never boring story featuring a bunch of sicko rapist murderers, some not refraining from incest. The author loves describing details, be that computer specs or rape scenes. The post-climax aftermath is so long it’s worth a short story in itself. Still, the storyline is dosing the suspense so perfectly the book made me keep reading until very late in the night. Some evenings I had trouble falling asleep because of the adrenaline.
There is even some dry and bitter humor in it, the kind I like a lot. I don’t know if that was supposed to be a joke but the characters drink enormous amounts of coffee all the time. But maybe that’s a thing they do in Sweden.
First time ever I compared the English and German translations before buying the book and found the English one meh and went for German by Wibke Kuhn. (There was also something weird about the English translation acronyms like “T.V.”, “I.T.”, “C.E.O.” and roman numbers with lowercase letters like “x.ii”. Maybe it’s just me who gets distracted by details like these…)
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Crime and Punishment
I was traumatized by being forced to read this (and many other books painfully boring for teenagers) at high school but 20+ years later I was inspired by a Hacker News thread to give it another go.
Not saying that it was the most entertaining book I’ve ever read but there is certainly something in it. I liked how complicated Raskolnikov’s personality is and the description of all the difficult interpersonal relationships.
I’ve read this book in the 1970 Hungarian translation by Imre Görög and Margit G. Beke, and it was all right, not too archaic. There is a modern translation from 2015 by András Soproni which seems to have received praise in literary circles, unfortunately it was nowhere to be found for purchase.
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The Year of the Flood
It is a slow book, but a bit too slow to my taste. The preaches by Adam One were more annoying than entertaining. Gave up at 55%.
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Oryx and Crake
This was my first book by the author. The story is slow but not annoyligly slow, I did like the description of the pre and post apocalyptic distopian world populated by gene manipulated plants, animals and humans (and human-like beings).
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Ball Lightning
Hard science fiction that gets a bit too hard. The story is flat and boring, I gave up at 75%. (Iknow, I know…)
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The Kaiju Preservation Society
Fun light read!
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Childhood's End
Overlords are amazing.
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Rendezvous with Rama
“A gem of hard science fiction.” I would give this 10 stars!
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Lullaby
Weird, sick and entertaining.
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The Dispossessed
My first book from the author. Clever criticism of socialist utopia and wild liberal capitalism in a fiction form. Author was recommended by Sergio.
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The Stand
Oh boy, this is a long read, also a masterpiece. I’ve read the 1990 uncut edition, which is 1153 pages in print.
The first part, where a flu virus wipes out all but a few thousand’s worth of Earth’s population is mind-blowingly good. I will forever remember the appendicitis scene.
After that it’s a long and unusual battle of good and evil, with a bit too much religion, supernatural and spiritualisam for my taste (hence the 4 stars).
This might have been my first Stephen King novel.
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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Positive vibes, likeable characters, iterspecies sex :) Fun light read from beginning to end.
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Station Eleven
Beautifully written story, could not stop reading! I hope all the pandemics I have to live through will be like Covid 19 and not like the Georgia Flu in the book….
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Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)
Started great, gradually became incredibly boring at about 60%. I bailed out.
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A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1)
Meh. I had high expectations but ended up having a forgettable experience. There was just too much religion (maybe because I’m an atheist, and despite I do have some basic education on Catholicism) and old English and Latin and not enough story? I did like the buzzards though!
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The Three-Body Problem
I’ve got this book recommended by multiple people, but I found it OK at most. The computer game scenes even annoyed me.
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The Kingdom
This was my first book by the author and the first Scandinavian crime novel and it did not fail to entertain me for a second. Especially liked the depth of the characters and the way their true nature unfolded. Read it in Hungarian translation by Viktória Sulyok, she did a pretty solid job.
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Project Hail Mary
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gave up at about one third. I was not being entertained at all, could not keep track of all the similarly named family members (of which there are many) and did not develop any interest in knowing the remaining 2/3 of the story. The only takeaway is that I learned a bit of history (civil wars of Colombia) I was not aware of before.
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Mario und der Zauberer
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Gott wohnt im Wedding
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Dharma - Egy család regényes története a Tiszától a Gangeszig
Könnyed, szórakoztató olvasmány, egy menetben fogyasztható. Átjön a szándék, hogy az író próbált nagyon szépen, kidolgozottan írni, de sajnos ez néha inkább úgy tűnik, hogy műveltségével és szókincsével próbál kérkedni. A “retró-hangulatot” sem sikerült szerintem úgy összehoznia anélkül, hogy ne legyen egy kicsit izzadtságszaga.
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10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works
I’ve recently grown interest in how meditation can be utilized in a non-religious way potentially even by skeptics like me. The author’s story is exactly about this. It did not teach me how to meditate but through his well written “true story” I got one step closer and if I ever decide to dig deeper myself I now know what to expect. I particularly liked the author’s writing style.
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Der Schwarm
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A Jeltisev család
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Tranquility
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The Invincible
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The Door
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Solaris
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Return From the Stars
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Milota
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Jadviga párnája
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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Chronicle of a Death Foretold
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Cat's Cradle
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Breakfast of Champions
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Bluebeard
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Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
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The Martian
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Rabbit at Rest (Rabbit Angstrom, #4)
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I, Robot (Robot, #0.1)
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How to Win Friends and Influence People
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Eyland
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Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)
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Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
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Make Room! Make Room!
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Az ördög egy fekete kutya
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Akik már nem leszünk sosem
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Nincstelenek: Már elment a Mesijás?
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The Master and Margarita
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Anna Édes
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Eifel-Blues (Siggi Baumeister, #1)
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Artemis
Artemis kept me entertained from the beginning to the end despite not fully meeting my high expectations after The Martian. Kudos for the female protagonist (a nerd, not a princess or a housewife!) and the wide diversity of gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation of characters.
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Artemis
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A Scanner Darkly
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A vége
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Er ist wieder da
Entertaining (despite the main character ;) and thought provoking. Some references to contemporary German politics might be hard to get for those not familiar with the matter but that does not make the book less enjoyable.
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Leányrablás Budapesten (Ambrózy báró esetei, #1)
Izgalmas, csavaros történet, még ha a legvége csalódás is (ezért scak 4 csillag). Tetszett a korabeli Budapest és Magyarország ábrazolás, a nyelvezet pedig sikeresen marad korhű anélkül, hogy eröltetett lenne vagy nehézkes lenne olvasni.
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Fekete gyémántok
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The Elephant Vanishes
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Szerelem Bolondjai
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Deadeye Dick
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Albérlet a Síp utcában
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A gavallérok
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Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
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The Gods Themselves
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Blindness
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A Szelistyei asszonyok
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Beyond the Mountain
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The Invisible Man
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
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Ubik
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The Trial
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The Witches of Eastwick
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
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Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom, #1)
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Lolita
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Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle
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Breakfast at Tiffany's and Three Stories
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The Sirens of Titan
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The Martian Chronicles
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)
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The Great Gatsby
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The Catcher in the Rye
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The Bell Jar
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Slaughterhouse-Five
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
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Foundation (Foundation, #1)
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Dune (Dune #1)
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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Catch-22
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Brave New World
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Animal Farm
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A Farewell to Arms
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2001: A Space Odyssey
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1984