Ready Player Two which picks up shortly after the events of the first book.
Just finished âMoby Dick; or, The Whale.â
Meh.
It will be remanded to the family library, not to be read again (I expect).
Did the whale finally make an appearance?
Spoiler alert: yes.
After 600 pages of not Moby Dick. Iâma gonna spoil that for any potential readers.
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Starting up âBeartownâ a novel by the same guy who wrote âA Man Called Ove.â
Also watching the limited series on HBO, so I better get cracking before the next episode.
Yep, it is pretty elusive, that white whale⌠until, all of a sudden, itâs not
yeah, whales are like that
Iâm on The Maltese Falcon now. Thatâs another one where the book and movie are incredibly similar. The screenwriter hardly deserved a paycheck. The audiobook is kind of funny in that the narrator does a different voice for each character. Most arenât exactly like the movie, but heâs clearly trying for a Peter Lorre and a Sydney Greenstreet.
Any good?
Yeah. Iâve enjoyed it so far.
Yesterday I was about half through and up till then itâd been almost identical to the movie. Now in the second half, it has differed quite a bit. Iâm now up to the part where theyâre discussing the fall guy. Everything in the movie is still there. They mostly just tightened things up, getting rid of a couple minor characters who take up a bunch of pages (Spadeâs lawyer, Gutmanâs daughter) and removing a lot of police interaction and a long expository passage that wouldnât work in a movie, and cutting out some interaction with his secretary.
OK, finished âBeartown.â Easy read, 400 pages done in 5 days. Sharp contrast to âMoby Dick,â which took me over a year.
Pretty good book. The series is already departing a lot from the book, after one episode.
If you enjoyed Ready Player One, youâll probably like Ready Player Two. I donât think itâs as good as the original so far but Iâm still enjoying it.
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OK. I finished The Maltese Falcon. Iâd heard that Bogart had ad libbed âThe ⌠uh⌠stuff that dreams are made ofâ so I wondered how the book ended. Turns out its about as youâd expect. Heâs back at the office, his secretary is pissed/creeped out that he turned in Brigid, and at the very end Milesâ wife appears.
I went back to watch the end of the movie. The line is done better than I remembered. The âuhâ is there because he shifts his focus from the cop who asked the question about the statue to the unseen Brigid being led away.
Oh. Thereâs another change that is kind of funny. In the movie, Gutman palms a $1000 bill to make it look like Brigid took it. After asking Brigid, Spade says Gutman took it, Gutman admits it, and Gutman says Spade âpassed the test with flying colorsâ or something like that. But in the book, passing the test meant taking Brigid to the bathroom and having her strip and be searched. They didnât change the dialogue at all.
About halfway through Thomas Sowellâs Basic Economics.
No, the concepts arenât new to me, but what Iâm enjoying are the concrete examples he supplies, especially ones from various countries at various historical periods. The Soviet examples are pretty interesting.
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Thatâs been on my âto readâ list for a while.
Whatâs amusing to me is I own a hardcover copy of this (and several other Sowell books â bought when there was a big sale somewhere), and up til this year, the only Sowell book I had read was his one on late-talking kids (before my son was diagnosed as autistic).
Anyway, I saw this video a month ago:
And I thought âjeez, I need to get startedâ⌠and then I got audiobook versions through my library. Already went through the Thomas Sowell reader (a sampler from many books/columns, which I did first to try to figure out which books to read next). Then I read The Vision of the Anointed. Anyway, now Iâm onto the economics books.
The Light Between Oceans
I finished The Thin Man. This one differed greatly from the movie. The most surprising thing was that the banter between Nick and Nora was almost totally missing. Since that was the best part of the movie, Iâd assumed it must have been in the book. The book was duller than the movie. Thereâs no real action or suspense at all, just a bunch of conversations mainly between Nick and the other characters. I probably would have thought it was better if I hadnât seen the movie, but it still isnât anywhere near as good as The Maltese Falcon. A disappointment was that it missed the funniest joke in the movie, even though its setup (âHavenât you heard of the Sullivan act?â) was in the book.