The Silence of the Lambs
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Gone With The Wind
The Godfather
Apocalypse Now (Heart of Darkness)
Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)
Rosemary's Baby
Perfume
The Exorcist
A Clockwork Orange
Showing posts with label do androids dream of electronic sheep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label do androids dream of electronic sheep. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Top Ten Tuesday: Great Posters For Books Made Into Movies
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is technically supposed to be a cover freebie, but honestly I am not huge into book covers. So I'm doing a little twist on it: I'd originally thought of highlighting books that get new covers when a movie is released and the best or worst of those, but instead, I'm just going to do the posters for the movies themselves! I have either seen the movies or read the books (mostly both) for every one of these.
The Silence of the Lambs
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Gone With The Wind
The Godfather
Apocalypse Now (Heart of Darkness)
Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)
Rosemary's Baby
Perfume
The Exorcist
A Clockwork Orange
The Silence of the Lambs
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Gone With The Wind
The Godfather
Apocalypse Now (Heart of Darkness)
Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)
Rosemary's Baby
Perfume
The Exorcist
A Clockwork Orange
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Great Titles
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about book titles. Specifically, good ones! I'm only human, and as susceptible to the pull of a great title as anyone. So here are ten that got my attention!
A Clockwork Orange: I remember reading one that Burgess wanted to contrast the idea of mechanics/clockwork with the most alive thing he could think of, and came up with the juicy burst of an orange. I loved the book, and the title is captivating in its own right.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: I understand why this wouldn't have worked as the title of a movie, but it's so much better than Blade Runner.
The Color Purple: Every time I think about the title, I remember the central tenet of the book...which is effective for a title to do!
Exit West: This one just immediately suggests questions you have to read the book to find the answers to, like who's doing the exiting, and west of where?
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: This title is a spoiler for its own book! But it promises an interesting story, and it delivers.
Skinny Legs and All: Tom Robbins has a way with eye-catching titles.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: I read this book because a college roommate liked it, but I would have 100% picked it up based on the title alone anyways.
Thank You For Smoking: There words in this order is so unexpected to see that it immediately grabs your attention.
Pride and Prejudice: The alliteration on this one just gets it stuck in your head. And it has a nice rhythm to it when you say it out loud!
Gone Girl: More alliterative goodness. The single syllables here give it a distinctive ring as well.
A Clockwork Orange: I remember reading one that Burgess wanted to contrast the idea of mechanics/clockwork with the most alive thing he could think of, and came up with the juicy burst of an orange. I loved the book, and the title is captivating in its own right.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: I understand why this wouldn't have worked as the title of a movie, but it's so much better than Blade Runner.
The Color Purple: Every time I think about the title, I remember the central tenet of the book...which is effective for a title to do!
Exit West: This one just immediately suggests questions you have to read the book to find the answers to, like who's doing the exiting, and west of where?
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: This title is a spoiler for its own book! But it promises an interesting story, and it delivers.
Skinny Legs and All: Tom Robbins has a way with eye-catching titles.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: I read this book because a college roommate liked it, but I would have 100% picked it up based on the title alone anyways.
Thank You For Smoking: There words in this order is so unexpected to see that it immediately grabs your attention.
Pride and Prejudice: The alliteration on this one just gets it stuck in your head. And it has a nice rhythm to it when you say it out loud!
Gone Girl: More alliterative goodness. The single syllables here give it a distinctive ring as well.
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Top Ten Tuesday: Unique Book Titles
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we're looking at books with interesting titles. At first I could only think of a couple and despaired at coming up with ten, but as I looked over my list of books I've read, it turns out there are a lot of titles that seem, well...kind of weird.
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?: This is also known as the book that inspired Blade Runner, which is a cool movie but a very different (and very good!) experience as a book.
A Clockwork Orange: Also the inspiration for a famous movie, which is a more-but-not-entirely faithful adaptation of the book. This book has its own invented slang, which is a fun challenge to try to figure out as you read along, and is generally a very interesting read.
Me Talk Pretty One Day: The title of this book is also the title of one of the funniest essays inside it, in which David Sedaris recounts his very frustrating attempts to learn French.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: The first collection of Oliver Sacks case studies I ever read, including the one that gave the book its name...Sacks has a real gift for neurological case studies and this volume is fascinating and highly recommended.
Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: Honestly, this book of myths told like a modern teenager might re-tell them gets old pretty fast, but the title is delightful and accurate!
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: This book of Chuck Klosterman's insightful, funny writing about pop culture was a recommendation from a college roommate and is still on my shelves to this day.
My Booky Wook: Russell Brand's memoir is hysterically funny. Miss the second one, though, it wasn't anything special.
Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging: I loved this whole series about a British teenage girl, and all of them have amazing titles, this is just the first one.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: This was also a recommendation, from the same college roommate who recommended the Klosterman, but this was much less successful. It's quite a title, but it's mostly about hippies doing a ton of drugs and I HATED it.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: It's false advertising (for my money, anyways...I did not enjoy reading it at all), but it's a killer title.
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?: This is also known as the book that inspired Blade Runner, which is a cool movie but a very different (and very good!) experience as a book.
A Clockwork Orange: Also the inspiration for a famous movie, which is a more-but-not-entirely faithful adaptation of the book. This book has its own invented slang, which is a fun challenge to try to figure out as you read along, and is generally a very interesting read.
Me Talk Pretty One Day: The title of this book is also the title of one of the funniest essays inside it, in which David Sedaris recounts his very frustrating attempts to learn French.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: The first collection of Oliver Sacks case studies I ever read, including the one that gave the book its name...Sacks has a real gift for neurological case studies and this volume is fascinating and highly recommended.
Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: Honestly, this book of myths told like a modern teenager might re-tell them gets old pretty fast, but the title is delightful and accurate!
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: This book of Chuck Klosterman's insightful, funny writing about pop culture was a recommendation from a college roommate and is still on my shelves to this day.
My Booky Wook: Russell Brand's memoir is hysterically funny. Miss the second one, though, it wasn't anything special.
Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging: I loved this whole series about a British teenage girl, and all of them have amazing titles, this is just the first one.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: This was also a recommendation, from the same college roommate who recommended the Klosterman, but this was much less successful. It's quite a title, but it's mostly about hippies doing a ton of drugs and I HATED it.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: It's false advertising (for my money, anyways...I did not enjoy reading it at all), but it's a killer title.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Book 44: Dune
"Somewhere this night he had passed a decision-nexus into the deep unknown. He knew the time-area surrounding them, but the here-and-now existed as a place of mystery. It was as though he had seen himself from a distance go out of sight down into a valley. Of the countless paths up out of that valley, some might carry a Paul Atrides back into sight, but many would not."
Dates read: April 18-23, 2016
Rating: 6/10
Lists/awards: Hugo Award, NY Times Bestseller
For some reason, I've always preferred fantasy to science fiction. They're similar genres, it's not for nothing that they're usually shelved together: new worlds, usually some sort of hero quest narrative, human stories peppered with imaginative twists that let you see them in a new light. If I'm being honest, usually the most significant different on a fundamental level I notice is that if the story is set in space or has robots, it's science fiction. If there are elves and dragons, it's fantasy. But even though I know intellectually that the differences between them are as much cosmetic as anything, I'd chose fantasy over sci-fi any day. That being said, one of my all-time favorite books, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?, is science fiction, and Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorite TV shows. Frank Herbert's Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, so I figured I owed it a try.
Dune drops you right into the story without easing you in with world-building before the plot picks up, which I personally found alienating and made it hard for me to get into it from the beginning. It's the story of a young nobleman, Paul Atrides, whose family is entangled in interplanetary intrigue. The Atrides family is given control of a planet called Dune, notable for being the sole source of a precious substance, the spice melange, which allows people to tap into enhanced mental abilities. When the Atrides are betrayed by their enemies, the Harkonnens, the Duke Leto dies but his consort Jessica and son Paul escape into the desert planet, where Paul (the result of a breeding program by a religious/philosphical/political sect) taps into extraordinary abilities and becomes a religious icon among the native population. Of course, he has vengeance to bring upon the Harokkens and a final battle for power between the families looms.
Having read Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand Faces, it was pretty easy to recognize Paul's story as the Hero's Journey. There's a reason this particular narrative is so popular across time and cultures: when done well, it's really compelling. Was this done well? Not especially, but it wasn't bad or even mediocre. It just didn't do a lot for me, personally. Like I said, it took me a while to get into it and it's kind of a space opera...it starts at like a 7 in intensity and waxes and wanes from there, but it's high drama throughout. I'd have liked a chance to warm up to and get emotionally invested in the characters before they started being put in peril. And on a shallow note about the characters, it bothered me that some of them had fairly standard-issue names: Jessica, Paul, Duncan, even Leto. Then there are some named Thufir, Gurney, and Irulan. I tend to feel like an author should either "go there" with mostly unusual naming patterns or not, but the in-between doesn't really work.
Once I got about a quarter of the way into it, I got a feel for the world and the novel as a whole and I enjoyed it more, but at the end of the day it wasn't really for me. Assuming for the sake of argument a continuum from entirely character-driven stories to entirely plot-driven stories, I tend to prefer things on the character side and I'd slot Dune on the plot side. I'm a big movie-watcher when I'm not reading, and there are plenty of movies that I've seen that I recognize are high quality, but that I don't really like. This is the same kind of deal...I can understand why it's been so popular and sold so well, but I don't know that I'd read it again or recommend it to anyone.
Thursday, August 4, 2016
Book 36: A Calculated Life
"And, rejoining the mid-afternoon crowds ambling in the hot spring breeze, she thought about her work colleagues who went back to their own kitchens in their own homes at the end of each day. She wondered if they, too, gave names to all of their meals."
Dates read: March 27-28, 2016
Rating: 4/10
I get really annoyed by people who smugly insist that they don't eat GMOs. Literally every food available at the store has been genetically modified. The corn we buy at the supermarket bears precious little resemblance to the corn that European settlers would have seen when they came to the United States for the first time. It's bigger, sweeter, more robust. How did it get that way? Cross-breeding! Like everything else out there! Which is just a crude form of...wait for it...genetic modification. If no one objects to cross-breeding, which is necessarily a much more blunt form of genetic modification, why object to much more precise changes in the genome? What if we could make tomatoes bigger and more resistant to disease without losing flavor? Who loses?
Where I think the argument gets interesting is when you start to follow the slippery slope down. We've already made significant genetic modifications (again, through cross-breeding) to our domestic animals. What if we decided to start tinkering with people? It might start out with someone totally benign, like neutralizing the BRCA genes and sparing thousands of women the agonizing choice between their reproductive organs and almost certain cancer. Eradicating Tay-Sachs, Parkinson's. But what about other genetically-related syndromes? What about dwarfism? Down Syndrome? Some forms of deafness that are genetically linked? We start staring down an uncomfortably eugenicist barrel.
A future like this is where we find ourselves in Anne Charnock's A Calculated Life. It's the future and there are three kinds of people: organics (totally normal people except with genetic altering to prevent most diseases and addictions), bionics (given an implant that dramatically increases mental performance), and simulants (humans "born" as adults with incredibly powerful cognitive capacity, basically robots in human bodies). Simulants, like our main character Jayna, live in communal compounds and are leased to their employers for large sums of money, collecting only a small allowance of their own. Jayna and her friends are a second generation of simulant designed to be more "lifelike" than the first, who had no real personalities. Amid worrying reports that the simulants are starting to act, well, more like people, Jayna finds herself convinced that learning more about non-simulants in their natural environment will help her be better at her job (predictive trend analysis) and starts to reach out beyond the borders of the world she's always known.
It's pretty easy to see where the story is going when it starts to go out of its way to bring up Jayna's interesting, good-hearted organic coworker Dave. Obviously, they're going to fall for each other and Consequences Will Ensue. I think I've mentioned before that I'm not at all put off by spoilers, because I feel like they shed light on lazy writing (if all your story has is the twist, it doesn't have anything), so having a good idea of how the plot would turn out wasn't the problem. The problem is that it didn't get there in any sort of interesting or exciting way. Jayna and Dave are never more than thin sketches of characters and their world doesn't have much richness or detail. It feels like a mishmash of 1984 and Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? except without the incisive social insight of either. It's not egregiously bad, just aggressively mediocre.
Tell me, blog friends...do you care about GMOs?
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