Topic: Gaming Steve Book Club! A thing we could do.

[Oviraptor]

I'm left wondering how they moved on after all that pollution. Surely their life expectancy plummeted?

[Krakow Sam]

The one in the book is pretty dramatic but London had a history of appallingly bad smogs which didn't really stop until after the 1950s when people stopped burning coal for absolutely everything.

I guess in this case the cleansing rainstorm was a dramatic device, symbolising the physical and metaphorical corruption being washed out of the city. As for the life expectancies, all the rich people left town, and poor people in Victorian London already had a pretty alarming mortality rate so i doubt anyone really noticed, sadly.

[Slinky]

I think the Rads certainly advanced the country's development and kept it a world power, but I feel that after all the political reform happened, the Rads really didn't have anything to do and ended up forming a corrupt government and a huge separation between the right and the poor, as well as producing way much more pollution than anyone else would have.

So, to answer your question, yes and no.

[PatMan33]

(book suggestion)

The Great Gatsby. It is being made into a movie sooner and Stephen Colbert is also doing this on his show as a book club segment! Two birds one nut.

[emmet]

Sure, I'd totally read the Great Gatsby.

[LadyM]

I FINALLY finished the book!!!! Made myself read on the airplane, the last chapter was a blur but I'm done.

[Krakow Sam]

Yaaaaaay!

Thoughts?

[LadyM]

Honestly? The only part I really enjoyed was the sex part. It's not a book that interested me much but that doesn't mean it's not a good book. I'm sure not knowing much about the real people didn't help me with the story.

The events in it reminded me of Occupy Wall Street recently. The 99% vs the 1%. Interesting that this was written way before but still has relevance today.

What did those mysterious punch cards actually do? Everyone wanted them.

[Krakow Sam]

I didn't actually really get what the punch cards did until I looked it up.

Near the end Lady Ada is giving a lecture in France. The lecture is about what the punch cards do. Basically they run a program which proves a mathematical theorem which shows that you can't use one unified theory of mathematics to solve any given maths problem.

Basically its some computer science thing, which in the world of the book is discovered decades earlier than it was on our world.

[sgore]

SO...
This fell apart a couple years ago, and I apologize for that, but it really did seem like a fun idea at the time.

I wanted to gauge interest in people's willingness to start back up again. Maybe with a more rigid reading schedule? Start with a smaller work as a test and see what we can do from there?

I'm in the middle of reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash right now, but when I finish it up, it might be fun to put some work into reviving this subforum, and a book club might be a good way to do it. (We still have posts on page 1 from 2007 for goodness sakes.)