Anyone else ever notice how Hard Boiled Wonderland and Johnny Mnemonic share some key story elements? Weird.
@Moon#16914 thatâs one of the things that really hit me when i read that book and tried to talk about it with other people. just a bare description of the plot makes it sound very cyberpunk, but actually reading it, it doesnât feel that way at all (to me at least). though i guess with a lot of cyberpunk being white peopleâs imaginations of 80s japan, maybe that makes whatever hard boiled wonderland is âthe true cyberpunk.â
@yeso#16897 back in my day, YA books were about small mammals forming monastic orders, killing each other, and making really good food
I remember a scene from a gary paulsen novel where a guy is running from a collapsing building, but a sheet of metal or glass falls into him, slicing him in half and his legs keep running while his torso dies screaming on the ground. I remember reading that like come on man I'm eleven
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@saddleblasters#16915 Hard Boiled Wonderland is my favorite book, for better or worse. This is my third time through. The best thing about this book (and Murakami's best stuff) is the coolness in the contrast. The half-cyberpunk/half-postmodern-dreamworld thing is what keeps me coming back to this book. These two things that should clash instead just feed eachother in amazing ways.
Granted itâs got some weird gender stuff like all of his work...
Can we just have a whole thread arguing about whether Hard Boiled Wonderland counts as cyberpunk??
@CidNight#16976
I thought you'd never ask.
Edit: but seriously I avoided talking about Japanese cyberpunk entirely in my big post because it's like a whole other subject that I dont know nearly as much about.
@yeso#16928 Hatchet is the first full length book I remember reading entirely on my own. Itâs pretty intense.
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@Moon#16978 I knew I had found my community
i like brianâs winter* the book where he pretended the previous book in the series didnât happen so he could do a canadian winter story
*not a joke i really like it
@tapevulture#16996 I didnât even know it was a series. Neat!
@CidNight#16998 there were two books after brianâs winter that i didnât even know about. apparently the series concludes with 16 year old brian defeating a bear in battle, not bad
Where my animorphs heads at
@Moon#17001
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Never got into Animorphs, I do remember the television show. Did love Goosebumps though.
I never read the ending of animorphs, I fell off with the series at some point, but apparently it's actually a super downer. KA Applegate said this about that choice a few years ago. Mad respect.
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@Moon#17005 gotta respect that. Damn.
I never read Animorphs. Man those covers were goofy as hell.
@yeso#16835 Those sound like some good reads. I'm of course partly asking in order to ensure I have a neverending river of media funneled straight into my gullet, but mainly because I also like reading criticism and am sure there are more interesting sources for it out there than⌠the mainstream publications I read.
I have not read any Mathias Enard! I'll open up ten tabs on him right now, thank you.
@Moon#17005 Thank you for posting this. Incredible.
This thread's recent posts have cracked open my abiding suspicion that Hatchetâwhich a teacher read to my class when I was like sevenâprobably owns.
@captain#17016 ever read any jean-patrick manchette? Like neutron star-hard hardboiled crime novels. Jealous that I canât read french bc Iâm sure it's cool as hell in the original. The gary paulsen reminiscing made me think of him.
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@downtonabbey#16879 1. How did the translator manage to translate. 2. How does it sound in its original written language (spanish).
the english translator did a good job but did sort of overheat the prose style a bit. It's harsher in English vs the surface placidity + simmering tension of the spanish writing. I think I get why she went that route because english written in like a 1:1 rendering could be kind of flat and journalistic
already making plans to work backwords through her other books. I mean, take a look at this cover
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@yeso#17024
Yea theres such aggressive tone to the writing, but itâs fitting to the content of the novel. I figure theres a touch more subtlety with the original spanish language. I am curious to read more of her work, but hope itâs not all bleak stories. With any indication of that cover, it looks harsh