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11:50

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Q: Recommendations for books good for learners of foreign languages

I'm looking for ideas for books which are particularly suitable for adults to read in a foreign language that they are learning. Here are some criteria: Widely translated so the same recommendation can be used no matter what language is being studied. Simple use of language, especially short di...

ladenedge

15:58

It's book club time! Woooo

Alright, settle down everyone. One at a time.

hippietrail

gamarjoba!

ladenedge

Hello!

Ya ne gavaru pa-ruski?

Perhaps not.

hippietrail

ruskiy net. gruzinskiy.

sorry i only popped in because my other SE sites are so quiet right now

ladenedge

Darn you for interrupting our bustling book club meeting !!

hippietrail

i'll hush up a bit (-:

ladenedge

16:08

Just for the recond, Gruzinskiy is Georgian? How different is it from Russian?

Anna Lear

@ladenedge Completely. :)

hippietrail

like thai is different from english (-:

ladenedge

oh my !

hippietrail

except georgian has more russian words than english has thai words i spose

ladenedge

Good to know. I'll stop asking people who speak Georgian about their Russian, in that case.

Anna Lear

16:09

So... book club. How do we want to do this?

ladenedge

Right, fun.

user15026

Good question.

ladenedge

Well, I brought a few questions that I thought might spark some discussion. Your questions are welcome too, of course.

Anna Lear

That sounds like a good place to start. :)

ladenedge

So, I'll just start with one. Obviously there should be a big SPOILER disclaimer here, but yeah.

First question: What was your favorite part or aspect of the book?

(Tough one, I know.)

user15026

16:13

I liked that the undead people weren't just about OMNOMNOM brains.

user15026

It's the little tihngs.

Anna Lear

For me, it was actually the premise of the book - I'm a sucker for this kinda stuff where we start playing with the definition of death. Throw in the adventure and comedy elements and it's just a fun time for all involved.

ladenedge

My favorite part was even littler than the uplifted undead: I loved it when new people looked at the hero's face and GGUURRGAAGGHHH

user15026

hahaha yeah, that too.

ladenedge

So how did Mogworld play with 'death'? Obviously the undead characters still had souls, if you will, and were every bit as moral and interesting as the "living" characters. Were there other ways in which the book messes around with the idea of living and death?

user15026

16:17

Well, the characters weren't actually real, and I liked the twist of the computer characters eventually dying and not returning - it was interesting for me because in every video game (minus a couple, I know there's one on the iphone) you can always start again with your character - death isn't permanent

Anna Lear

Yeah, that was a nice touch. I guess I'd call that more playing with 'life', cause the book doesn't even reveal right away that they are not real, but they are for all intents and purposes "alive".

ladenedge

I guess there were several types of death in the book: the programmers wanted to kill Brian (right?), Jim dying in the very beginning, Jim becoming un-dead, Jim killing himself unsuccessfully over and over, and the sort of final-death that the programmers inflict at the end. And possibly also whatever it is that happened to the characters who were taken over by real players.

Anna Lear

What did you guys think of the writing style? In particular, with emails and chat transcripts being injected periodically into the story?

ladenedge

This kind of leads to one of the things I disliked about the book. There is so much material here to mine for philosophical insights, but it didn't feel like the author spent any time on doing so, and didn't leave much time for the reader. I kept wanting the characters to reflect on their situations, but they never seem to really get into it.

user15026

@ladenedge I found them a little...shallow, I think, in terms of development.

ladenedge

16:23

I liked the writing style pretty well. I kept trying to think about how else I might have done the real-vs-game-world thing, and nothing better really came to mind. I also found the real-world interaction quite suspenseful, perhaps because Jim and his world were obviously at their mercy.

user15026

@AnnaLear It's not my favourite style of book, to be honest. I like things a bit more homogeneous.

user15026

@ladenedge I never really thought of it that way, to be honest. That does make sense. If we had gotten a more expository view of that side of the story, the suspense would've been lost some.

Anna Lear

It felt a bit like playing a video game to me where you often (these days, anyway) follow a plot and then periodically hack into computers or get some other sort of lore update and pause to read it for supplementary information.

ladenedge

hahah

That's a funny way to look at it - it does feel like that a bit in retrospect. Though I hate those portions of video games, typically, so obviously it worked a little better for me in this case.

user15026

@ladenedge I usually ignore them, which is, I tihnk, why they bugged me in the book.

ladenedge

16:27

Since we're on the subject, is there anything else you didn't much like about the book?

I'll start, from the negative portion of a brief review I posted elsewhere:

user15026

I felt it took a long time for the plot to really get swinging.

ladenedge

On the down side, nearly all of the characters have muddy motivations and inconsistent behavior, and the representation of the virtual world and Jim's interaction with the programmers becomes downright implausible as the book progresses. The most objectionable stuff came in the form of misogynistic behavior on the part of otherwise likable (and prominent) characters.

user15026

Yeah, I think my biggest problem can be summed up like this: Yahtzee wrote in the same style he reviews video games in

ladenedge

I had some fairly serious problems with how the characters behaved towards, uh.. what was her name. The barbarian they were lugging about everywhere.

user15026

Oh, that poor dear

user15026

16:29

they treated her terribly.

ladenedge

haha. I have only seen I think one Croshaw review, and I didn't really remember liking it so I didn't go back and view more fearing it would taint my enjoyment of the book.

Anna Lear

I'm very well familiar with his reviews, so as I read along, I kept reading in his voice with roughly the same style. I'm not sure if that made the book better or worse. :)

I have an incredibly tiny thing to nitpick on: the typos added for (I assume) realism to the chat logs. It's a nice touch in principle, but it felt overdone in some places. Maybe I just talk to people who don't make that many typos, though.

user15026

That drove me nuts

user15026

I know it was supposed to look "real" but typos in books are one of my biggest pet peeves

ladenedge

That drove me nuts, but struck me as toned down from what might be realistic... I've played online enough to experience some pretty poor language skills. (Or, more likely, they just don't care.)

Even the people with whom I chat at work are pretty lazy with stuff like that. Especially in chat, but I have some pretty painful emails as well. From college-educated adults.

I'm personally waiting for them to change around the definition of 'your' in the dictionary, the descriptivist bastards.

Alright, new question!

What were the moral considerations of the programmer's decision to erase the world at the end of the book?

user15026

16:34

Well, it's genocide, in a way

user15026

which is a pretty big deal.

ladenedge

Perhaps you could expound on 'in a way'?

user15026

well, they're not "real" people

Anna Lear

Indeed, with the book up until then establishing that things are basically alive, erasing the world killed them.

user15026

they're just computer bits

user15026

16:36

but even so, it's like killing an entire species who are helpless.

ladenedge

Do you think it matters that they are just computer bits, given what @AnnaLear notes?

user15026

I think it might make it easier for the programmers to sleep at night, but it still bugged me because I spent so much of the story cheering on these characters that felt real

user15026

so it depends whose morals.

ladenedge

Well, the question seems to be: what are the morally relevant characteristics of persons? And, then, do Jim and his fellows have those characteristics?

Like, is having human skin and a liver morally relevant? Seems like it probably isn't, so the fact that Jim doesn't have those shouldn't really matter.

user15026

Hm, good question. They have feelings, and desires, and independent thought, and the ability to reason

ladenedge

16:40

Indeed!

Anna Lear

Well, the book ends with one of the programmers at least "feeling bad" about erasing Jim, so there was clearly some thought put into what it meant to erase the world.

ladenedge

Yeah, the "hardest thing he's ever done" or something. I was sort of moved by that.. too bad the character who reflects most on his behavior and situation in the book was the dumb programmer who just wiped out an entire species of sentient beings...

The follow-up question is tricky, I think. To what extent, if any, is the Jim we read about in the epilogue the same person as the Jim we read about in the rest of the book?

Hey, markup works in chat? That's neat.

Anna Lear

That is tricky. :)

user15026

I think he became more "videogame"-y and less "person"-y

ladenedge

The later Jim doesn't seem to remember exactly what happened to him, but the author does seem to want us to feel like the two Jims share something essential - "he rejected it", and so forth.

Ignoring the book for a minute, you might also ask whether, supposing the programmers had put Jim back in his exact digital state after the "wipe", would that be the same Jim? Just because his "state" was the same?

Anna Lear

16:46

So is Jim really gone, or just "reset"? And if it's the latter, is the story really over?

ladenedge

God I hope the story is over.. :D

Anna Lear

Haha

I mean more like "is it basically repeating itself somewhere again?"

ladenedge

But yeah, there does seem to be a sense in which he's the same Jim, just.. without the memory or something.

user15026

I think of it like clone people - if I die, and you use my DNA to make a new me with all my memories and junk, is that now me?

user15026

I don't think it is, personally.

Anna Lear

16:47

@ladenedge Clearly not all of this "state" was persisted into the backup. =)

ladenedge

true !

Anna Lear

We could probably think of it as a computer crashing - whatever's saved to the harddrive will survive, but anything still in RAM will be wiped out.

ladenedge

Clones may not be the same person, but what about, say, "you" after you've passed through a Star Trek transporter? Perhaps that's kind of the same thing as restoring Jim's "state"?

user15026

Hm. I think that's still me because they just "moved" me, they didn't "replace" me. Unless I misunderstand how they work.

Anna Lear

@ladenedge The transporter just moves bits around... Jim was technically "dead and gone" for a while.

ladenedge

16:49

@AnnaLear: does it move information, or actual matter?

Anna Lear

@ladenedge Now we're getting existential. :)

In a human, everything is encoded in the body, including memory. So if you transport the brain and reconstruct it on the other end, you should reconstruct the memory exactly as it was.

ladenedge

I guess it would have to be moving matter.. it'd be hard to reconstruct a Kirk on a planet without carbon, or something. Nevermind about that line.

Yeah, sorry, bad example. :(

Lots of fun questions in the book implicitly, I think. Again, too bad he didn't really explore it imho.

So: would you recommend this book?

user15026

I am not sure that I would, honestly. The story was a little slow moving and it's not my favourite writing style.

Anna Lear

I'm not sure. I think I would, just because it had interesting ideas (for example, there isn't really a clear hero or bad guy -- Jim's motivation was pretty selfish), but it wouldn't be a strong recommendation.

The book was a bit uneven for me to fully enjoy it, but it's not bad for a first effort. :)

ladenedge

I'm on board with both of those evaluations. Personally the misogynistic stuff drops it way off the radar, but if it hadn't been for that I would give it a stong "it's fine."

Anna Lear

16:54

Overall rating: solid meh. :)

ladenedge

Really neat ideas, a couple funny parts, and a lot of "okay, that's nice."

user15026

Yeah, exactly

ladenedge

The metaphors really started getting messy at the end, too, which didn't really help. Jim getting sucked into a flash drive, or something? (I can't totally recall what was supposed to be happening there.) Kinda blew the suspension of disbelief for me.

user15026

Yeah, it got a little bit weird. It felt like he was like OMG I HAVE TO END THIS without really figuring out how to do that.

user15026

SO he just sorta handwaved it.

ladenedge

16:56

aye.

Any other questions that either of you had come up with?

Anna Lear

I don't have anything else.

user15026

Nope. :) I just liked getting to talk about books :)

ladenedge

Heh, yeah, fun.

So, meta-wise, do you think this is worth doing again?

Anna Lear

I think so. It may have been just 3 of us now, but we can certainly grow from here.

user15026

I would totally do it again. :) Hopefully as the site gains people we can get more involvement :)

Anna Lear

16:58

@ladenedge What do you think?

ladenedge

Well, we generated two questions, only one of which had an answer, so I would say that bit fell somewhat flat.

user15026

Yeah, this was a hard book to ask questions for, I found

ladenedge

But it was kind of fun overall, I guess, and I think you're both right that it really ought to only grow.

user15026

It was a good book to read, but since it was kinda shallow in its characterization it wasn't as good for questions

ladenedge

Agree, @AshleyNunn. I was really stretching for questions.

Aye.

Anna Lear

16:59

I think the social aspects of the book club are also important. As a moderator, I like the fact that it's something that'd bring people back to the site. The rest will follow. :)

user15026

@AnnaLear That's a really good point

ladenedge

Alright, well let's go and see about getting a book for next month, then.

Anna Lear

Sounds like a plan. Do we want to do fantasy again? Or try for a non-fiction? Or just let it evolve naturally on meta?

ladenedge

I think it's okay to let it evolve, though I'm not opposed to some alternating sort of rule..?

user15026

I'd like a different genre - I like variety

ladenedge

17:01

Sure, that's what @TML said too.

Anna Lear

So, fantasy off the table for next month but other than that we'll see where the interest is?

ladenedge

I'm good with that!

user15026

Works for me :)

ladenedge

Alright, well hopefully I'll see you and others back here next month for whatever book we choose!

Thanks for the chat!

Anna Lear

Excellent. I'll make a meta post. :) Thank you both for coming today. I created a bookmark for our chat so it's accessible by anyone who wants to read through it.

user15026

17:03

No problem. It was super fun and I look forward to doing it again!

Anna Lear

All bookmarked conversations are here: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/1037/…

@ladenedge Just noticed the bit at the end of your "let's do this" meta post. Do we have 3 questions about Mogworld? :) And how were you planning on financing the free copy of the next choice for authors?

Stack Exchange

17:29

0

Q: Let's choose book #2 for the book club

The first book club meeting happened today and we had fun discussing Yahtzee Croshaw's "Mogworld". You can read the chat transcript here. Now it's time to pick the next book! We want to vary the genres up a bit, so fantasy is off the table for the next choice, but anything else is fair game. Wha...

discussion book-club

ladenedge

@AnnaLear: oops, I checked out a bit too quickly. Yeah, I was just going to buy a book for the top three. I guess that's just me and @Beofett.

@Beofett: if you're out there, send me an email at [email protected] for a free book!

@ladenedge: you get a free book too! Send an email off, when you get time!

@ladenedge: email sent!

@ladenedge: what a delightful email. I've nary been so moved by a mere couple of sentences. Smashing!

Transcript for