I Read 1.5 Books | Reading Vlog
Вставка
- Опубліковано 29 чер 2024
- 0:00-Intro
0:04-House of Open Wounds
3:46-Interlude
4:35-Solaris
12:51-House of Open Wounds
14:34-Solaris
18:18-Outro
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It’s good to see books like Solaris reviewed in this community. Long missed opportunity to get the others read the classic sci-fi not just the more recent ones. Happy to see you enjoy it.
Your Polish subscriber here. It's funny how it ended up being a Polish-themed vlog, with Solaris being a Polish classic and Czajkowski/Tchaikovsky being of Polish descend 😅. One of the themes that Lem enjoyed exploring was that the alien life would be so foreign that any attempt at communication would be ultimately unsuccessful. He explored that idea at least also in Eden.
So glad to see Tchaikovsky getting more love and attention. He's one of my favorite writers in both the SF and F genres.
Solaris is one of those books that should be way more widely known amongst SF readers. It's not necessarily "perfect", but it has been an inspiration for a lot of more modern SF.
Oh my the interlude is suggesting spring is here and thanks for the interlude 🌱...
Omg that first interlude is so nice, the treeeeeeess
The info dumps were my favourite part of Solaris - I was actively looking forward to them. I didn't quite "get" everything else.
Did you enjoy it overall with the info dumps being your favorite part? I enjoyed it despite the parts I didn't like
@@merphynapierreviews Oh yes. Even if if we didn't get a lot of definitive stuff about the ocean, I enjoyed all the speculation and theories and failed experiments
When you start the vlog with a wave and hello what I actually hear is "Hi! Zuko here!"!
this is perfect 😂
I'm with you Merphy... I try SO hard to avoid spoilers. Like, if it's not in the first couple of chapters, I'm loathe to even bring it up :D
Merphy your videos are so enjoyable and well done! Thanks for all that you do.
I think if you liked Solaris you might also enjoy His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem. It’s kind of a continuation of the themes and presentation of Solaris.
I love Stanislaw Lem, I'm glad you enjoyed Solaris. I highly recommend his short story collection, The Cyberiad, which has a totally different tone to Solaris - it was a big influence on Douglas Adams!
I have found that listening to bookish videos podcast style on my way home from work gets me in the reading mood. it's like hype music before a game for an athlete. except the game is reading. and I'm a nerd. lol
I agree, he went hard right out the gate with House of Open Wounds. What hooked me with it was just his writing, the actual words and phrases he choses to tell us the story. Immense enjoyment is an understatement. City of Last Chances didn't quite hook me, but practically from page one I was bowled over. It's epic from start to finish!
So glad to see you enjoy Solaris. I read it as a teen and it marked my love for sci-fi. Listening to you talk to it made me want to re-read it but also made me realize many similar themes and story beats to Annihilation, so I'm not surprised you enjoyed both. If you want another recommendation in that vein of weird mind boggling sci-fi I would suggest either "roadside picnic" or "snail on the slope" by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Yes! Solaris is so good! I'm excited for this vlog for sure! If you like it, try Blindsight as well. I think it's better than Solaris but they are both 5 star books and in my top 5 from last year.
Blindsight is on my list!
I’ve never heard of Solaris but I’ll keep an eye out for it in the future! This kind of reminds me of when you did your review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in that it explores the big ideas and questions.
Glad you enjoyed Solaris. Its a book that while I was reading it my enjoyment level was low but some how has been a book I think about way more than I should. Im pretty sure I gave it 2 stars yet think about it way more often then so many books I have rated higher.
Sometimes if you Have A House of Open Wounds It is because you did not pay the Toll of the Hounds and they bit everyone in the house.... and with so much open ocean in Solaris there could be a Reapers Gale blow right up and then some one might have to review it. Although heavy magic might be pounding down on you, you would have a friend in Beak to keep you safe.
Found the book channel! yay!
15:02 excellent Wonka reference
Hi Merphy, good to see you getting more into scifi. I was wondering if you had read a book that was recommended to me as a classic cyberpunk work by several people (apart from Neuromancer). I am talking about Schismatrix Plus (1996) by Bruce Sterling which is supposed to be an inspiration for many other later works. This book gets a lot of praise, but not here among booktubers, I don't why. Let me know, thanks.
I have been to Kentucky many times but don't recall it being as picturesque as your interludes.
I interpreted House of Open Wounds as a sequel, enjoying both stories.
ooof, I just started an edit to cut me saying that. I recorded that first clip very early on in my reading when I had heard it was a prequel and then edited the vlog late at night and clearly wasn't listening closely enough to fix that mistake after I got further into the book
I am planning to reread Solaris this year. I have read it at least twice, but it has been a long time.
great reviews, loved hearing about how you read compared with your dad... i guess i also read more for character and theme than for concepts and their nuts and bolts. it's interesting you said he's way smarter than you are, i'd imagine that's just a different type of intelligence at play. empaths unite! =P
I still haven’t read Tchaikovsky but I love the covers on this series.
I REALLY need to read an Adrian Tchaikovsky book at some point. Theyre just so CHONKY x)
I read Solaris last year and we had very similar feelings! The vibes of the setting were very on point - so creepy! And very thought provoking about how we react to things we don't understand. But the story and the characters and thw infodumps... Meh.
The highly influential Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky made an unfaithful but still good (albeit very long) adaptation of Solaris in the 1970s. Stephen Soderbergh made a very different, also not especially faithful, still rather good adaptation in 2002. Both films concentrate a lot more on the relationship between Kelvin and his wife than the scientific aspects.
Solaris (the Russian 1972 version) is a great scifi movie, no clue how it compares to the book. Would be interested to check out the book and figure that out
It sounds like your dad should read "Stories of Your Life and Others", an anthology of short stories from which the movie Arrival was made. It's all hard sci fi full of infodumps explaining how the technology works. The writer Ted Chiang has a degree in science which explains a lot. I disliked that one and Solaris for the same reason haha.
That’s how I’ve been pronouncing “Solaris,” so if you mispronounced it, you can blame it on me. 😅 Thank you so much for buddy reading Solaris with me! That was so much fun!
My brother is very similar to your dad with a very scientific/analytical mind. He is a meteorologist so he reads a lot of articles and loves data, but when he tries to get into fiction, he will nit-pick at the very minute details.
Agree with everything you said about House of Open Wounds, it'd have to really mess up the ending for it to not be a 5/5 for me.
I do love how utterly alien Solaris is, as one review put it, it turns you in to a solarist trying to make sense of it all. (Despite Lem explicitly seeking to make Solaris beyond comprehension.)
Youll see some say the simulacra are the ocean probing the humans, but they could just as easily be its equivalent of a dream, or a reflex, or perhaps its immune system, or no doubt many other explanations. Its just like the scientists in the book going through numerous explanations for anything Solaris appears to do.
I think Lem was intending to present a pretty cynical view of it all, a kind of self serving arrogance to science and exploration that Snaut talks about and seems to be reflected in how insular they can become as they face their own visitors. I dont know about that, I think most science is much less arrogant than its commonly made out to be, and that weve long since proven we are not just seeking out a reflection of ourselves. I think we can get distracted and misguided by that much just as the characters (and maybe even reviewers) are, but that we have an insatiable appetite for knowledge for its own sake regardless.
I’ve never read a Tchaikovsky book👀
This book was on my tbr list in the late 60's but I never got around to it probably because of all the info dumps I'd heard about. And then there was the movie; I'd only seen the trailer and that put the whole Kakash on it for me. Sorry your review was very intertaining but still not for me.
Darn Chris's changing their minds out of nowhere. Thoughts out of nowhere? Sure, understandable. But changing his mind out of nowhere? Come one, Chris, do better.
I've gotten more into classic sci-fi lately and it's definitely a bit of a mixed bag with being focus on the sc-fi or the characters. While I do appreciate the concepts, I'd rather the characters drive the story. If I want to just go over concepts I'll pick up a non-fiction book on theoretical tech.
I have I feeling I’m in the minority here but I really didn’t like Solaris😅 I can respect it and see its value but it was just not at all an enjoyable read
Out of curiosity, did you ever finish Naruto?
Currently just finished Vol 42, she'll be doing another discussion video after Vol 48
I like info dumps, but I recently read a book where the author waaay overexplained everything and it was sooo annoying.
Murphy I'm disappointed in u w/ this review. Please be ur authentic happy self, not the political animal humans fool themselves into becoming. If u rlly gaf like u want us to believe u do, be the version of u we like and behave how ur supposed to. We're ur fans and u should be doing better