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Author Topic: Return of the Book Thread  (Read 1286286 times)
Hawkbit
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Reply #6650 on: July 01, 2022, 10:52:14 AM

Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer series 


This series had some of the most memorable moments of world-building. I still have some of the scenes playing out like a movie in my head.
Khaldun
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Reply #6651 on: July 01, 2022, 06:44:21 PM

Yeah, absolutely. It's one of those series where I had no idea what the fuck was going on in the beginning but by the end I was like OH FUCK RIGHT.
Velorath
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Reply #6652 on: August 08, 2022, 09:25:04 PM

Waiting for Samwise to review the new Dragonlance novel here.
Samwise
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Reply #6653 on: August 09, 2022, 07:03:00 AM

Looks like the library has a few copies on order, I'll check back in a week and see if I can grab it.  Should be a quick read.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Samwise
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Reply #6654 on: September 15, 2022, 06:47:39 AM

New Dragonlance novel is okay.  I thought it started off pretty strong in the first half while it was focusing on its new main character, and then around the midway point I realized we were just setting up another trilogy involving the Heroes of the Lance and time travel and I could feel my interest waning.  That said, I liked it more overall than any the War of Souls books, and I’ll most likely read the rest of the series as it comes out.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
NowhereMan
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Reply #6655 on: September 15, 2022, 01:57:04 PM

Just as a general thing, Games Workshop finished their Horus Heresy stuff a few years ago and now the Siege of Terra series is drawing to a close (Penultimate book has just been released, although apparently the last book is going to be a 2 parter). If you kind of enjoy 40k or used to play, the Siege series is generally pretty well written and has managed to avoid the horrendous inconsistency of the Heresy series. It's pretty fun reading if mostly not any kind of literature.

"Look at my car. Do you think that was bought with the earnest love of geeks?" - HaemishM
Khaldun
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Reply #6656 on: September 15, 2022, 03:18:00 PM

Enjoying The Blacktongue Thief, halfway through.
lamaros
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Reply #6657 on: September 16, 2022, 01:54:01 PM

Been reading some books on holiday. Finally got around to Bester's The Stars My Destination.

It's not aged well (/ was never good ?). I was really disappointed in it after hearing so much praise of Bester from a lot of places.

Oh well!

Enjoyed Tokyo Uneo Station and currently enjoying Shaun Walker's book about Russia, The Long Hangover.
Khaldun
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Reply #6658 on: September 16, 2022, 02:19:15 PM

Gosh, I still really like Stars. Maybe partly because it was so important historically in terms of how much it broke with genre conventions at the time.
Samwise
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Reply #6659 on: October 11, 2022, 10:04:35 AM

Last read: Goblin Errands, an indy RPG about goblins running errands.  I picked it up with the thought "maybe if I ever reinstall Discord I'll run this," but one of its core game mechanics is triggered when someone makes the rest of the table crack up, so I don't see it working well online.  Adding it instead to my "maybe if I ever get inspired to run a con one-shot" list, along with First They Came which also would be a great con game and also would not work nearly as well online because part of it is meant to be played blindfolded.

Up next: A Most Remarkable Creature, because I can't get enough books about smartass birds.  This one is about caracaras, which the first chapter of the book describes as: “If you try to imagine ten separate attempts to build a crow on a falcon chassis, with results falling somewhere between elegant, menacing, and whimsical, you wouldn’t be far off.”  So far so fun.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Khaldun
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Reply #6660 on: October 20, 2022, 07:00:54 AM

Just read Christopher Buehlman, The Blacktongue Thief, and really enjoyed it--first fantasy I've read in a while that had me genuinely jazzed up for the sequel whenever it comes.
HaemishM
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Reply #6661 on: October 22, 2022, 10:52:58 AM

Been on a strange of recent reads about the civil rights movement/labor movement/Mississippi, as part of research for my latest book. Finished Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and started on Wright's Native Son (which I have somehow never read - I don't think it was required school reading until after I graduated college). That was after reading Triangle: The Fire that Changed America about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. That was after reading Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury because I had always resisted reading the most famous Mississippi author because I just didn't want to read about my shitty state's past. Now I do. It's gobsmacking how much of my state's history, the history of the struggle in America and the history of the labor movement in America was just never taught at all in school when I was a kid.

Khaldun
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Reply #6662 on: October 26, 2022, 08:18:21 AM

Despite it all being important in your state. But I gotta say that this is less shitty states and more also something that was fairly universal for a lot of us in the Gen X age bracket. Nobody taught us anything about California's real history when I was growing up except for some vague shit about the Gold Rush and maybe something on the San Francisco earthquake and the equivalent of a 3-second Wikipedia entry on the missions before a school trip to one. Nothing on labor history, nothing on Native Americans, and most astonishingly, nothing on the Spanish and then Mexican presence at all--that was just completely obliterated from education from 1st grade to 12th grade. We did a school trip to Olivera Street once in downtown LA (it's a touristy fantasy version of pre-white Spanish/Mexican Los Angeles) and some kid asked the social studies teacher was the background was and he just shrugged and said "I have no idea".
Samwise
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Reply #6663 on: October 28, 2022, 10:48:32 AM

It's amazing how many gaps there are in what we get taught about the history of North America before the current US borders were drawn.  I've ended up accidentally learning a lot via genealogy research because I get really curious about the exact places where various ancestors lived, and because the place names sometimes don't show up on modern maps I end up doing a lot of history-googling to try to figure out where something was. 

For example: I have a great-great-grandpa who was born in Michigan when it was part of Canada, and moved to Santa Barbara at a time when it was essentially bilingual and Spanish was still the official language of record (even though California had been part of the US for more than a decade).  I also have a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma that was born in a multicultural village in Illinois that was then part of "New France," settled by a combination of French trappers and Illinois natives who had allied with the French for protection from the Iroquois.  I mostly don't think about the middle of the country at all, much less its history, so I was completely amazed to find out that Michigan was once part of British Canada and Illinois was once part of French Louisiana, or that there was this whole long period of cultural overlap in many places rather than instantaneous conquest/assimilation.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Khaldun
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Reply #6664 on: October 28, 2022, 10:55:02 AM

I was just digging this week into the period when the Europeans in eastern North America were the Dutch and the Swedes, not the English, and when most of them just wanted to trade for furs and had no interest in farming and taking land from Native Americans. (Quite the contrary, they want to buy food and furs from them.) This gets almost entirely forgotten in any conventionalized American history, just as the looooong period of Spanish rule over much of the West gets forgotten. There is so much more to how our present came to be, much of it bad but some of it just complicated and different. And here we are running headlong away from all that now, well beyond the ignorance common when we were kids.
Samwise
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Reply #6665 on: December 29, 2022, 04:49:48 PM

Up next: A Most Remarkable Creature, because I can't get enough books about smartass birds.  This one is about caracaras, which the first chapter of the book describes as: “If you try to imagine ten separate attempts to build a crow on a falcon chassis, with results falling somewhere between elegant, menacing, and whimsical, you wouldn’t be far off.”  So far so fun.

Finished this and enjoyed it a lot.  Like Finding the Mother Tree it's got an autobiographical aspect to it.  Is "gonzo science" a thing?  There's a bit I particularly liked where the author teams up with an entomologist in the Amazon to get a firsthand look at a particular species (the red-throated caracara) whose talent for strategically fucking up wasp nests without getting stung to death makes it mutually interesting.

Started today on The Ministry for the Future, which a few chapters in gives me very strong World War Z vibes, except with climate change instead of zombies.

(edit) also, seems worth mentioning here that I got one of my cousins The Black Company for Christmas after she told me she likes Game of Thrones type stuff.   DRILLING AND WOMANLINESS

(next-day edit to avoid bumping thread with double-post) Ministry for the Future very good.
« Last Edit: December 30, 2022, 12:59:00 PM by Samwise »

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
WayAbvPar
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Reply #6666 on: December 30, 2022, 01:20:40 PM

Anyone have a line on digital copies of the old Gygax Gord of Greyhawk/Gord The Rogue books? My paperbacks are basically dust motes now, and I have a hankerin' to re-read them (Greyhawk is far and away my fav D&D setting).

When speaking of the MMOG industry, the glass may be half full, but it's full of urine. HaemishM

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Reg
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Reply #6667 on: January 03, 2023, 05:12:10 AM

I've found that the best place to find that kind of stuff is in the #bookz channel on the Undernet. I just did a search there and there was a ton of Gygax stuff including what looked like the entire Gord series up to book 7,

I'm hoping you're old enough to remember how to get on IRC and know how it works - but if you're not let me know.
Samwise
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Reply #6668 on: January 03, 2023, 12:15:04 PM

I'm hoping you're old enough to remember how to get on IRC and know how it works - but if you're not let me know.

I had to get on IRC recently for the first time in forever and was annoyed by how difficult it is to find a free client (I remember mIRC being free and ubiquitous, but it's trialware now).  AdiIRC seems good though.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Teleku
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Reply #6669 on: January 03, 2023, 09:41:32 PM

Slummin it on IRC but dodging Discord.

For shame Samewise!


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Sky
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Reply #6670 on: January 04, 2023, 08:10:30 AM

Sub now to my onlyfans yo. Hot lumberbeard apples!

Anyway, I'm finally getting around to the rest of Zahn's SW stuff. Really enjoyable pulpy stuff. Haven't been reading much nonfic for a few years now, it's nice to have something in this lane right now.
WayAbvPar
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Reply #6671 on: January 23, 2023, 06:07:45 PM

The shitty Amazon WoT debacle made me re-read the books. I had re-read most of the first 8 or 9, but only read the Sanderson stuff once. Going directly from the last Jordan to the first Sanderson is jarring. No more pages of descriptions- just actual plot movement. It is amazing!

It would be nice an abridged version was released someday with a proper edit. You could squeeze into 9 books quite easily I would bet.

 
I've found that the best place to find that kind of stuff is in the #bookz channel on the Undernet. I just did a search there and there was a ton of Gygax stuff including what looked like the entire Gord series up to book 7,

I'm hoping you're old enough to remember how to get on IRC and know how it works - but if you're not let me know.

my IRC chops are pretty rusty, but I will dig around and see what I can find. Thanks for the tip!

When speaking of the MMOG industry, the glass may be half full, but it's full of urine. HaemishM

Always wear clean underwear because you never know when a Tory Government is going to fuck you.- Ironwood

Libertarians make fun of everyone because they can't see beyond the event horizons of their own assholes Surlyboi
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Reply #6672 on: January 23, 2023, 08:29:39 PM

WoT is basically S. Morgenstern’s classic of high adventure.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
lamaros
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Reply #6673 on: January 28, 2023, 03:14:02 PM

Picking this up here instead of the TV thread, re unfinished series.

I don't care. Don't care if Game of Thrones never ends, or any other series. The pay off was reading the books when they came out, and I massively enjoyed them at the time, and then slowly stopped enjoying them as much. I don't care now because I don't think the books if they ever come out will be interesting to me, and there's no closure I need. My enjoyment was there and won't go away.

I think if you're reading a book series as an investment.. well it's a bad investment. If the book itself doesnt have a payoff wait til the series has the payoff guaranteed before you start.

I know I'm not in line with a current trend where people want everything explained and closed off otherwise they feel unsatisfied and uncomfortable l, but I'm more than happy for a book or tv series (or painting, thank you Turner) to not be entirely finished and leave something to the imagination. As long as what is there is fun and or interesting why should we really care?

The idea of someone else writing Game of Thrones books should be exciting if those books are going to be exngaging, not because you have some sense of commitment you need resolved in order to move on.
NowhereMan
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Reply #6674 on: January 30, 2023, 02:04:07 AM

Honestly fuck Game of Thrones. I enjoyed them at the time but the lack of resolution in the whole series does kind of dim the enjoyment of the earlier books. Books should be able to stand alone (and in fairness the first GoT book really does) but part of what makes them enjoyable is also setting up longer running plots with pay offs. That's why trilogy writing has proven so popular, it's much easier to set up interesting plot hooks than to actually resolve them so earlier books are much easier to make exciting and interesting. In contrast when those plot hooks end in a damp squib that makes no sense it's disappointing and if they never get resolved the reader is left a bit confused as to whether that was actually meant to be something at all i.e. did the author just forget about this or did I just imagine this was meant to be something?

Scott Bakker's Second Apolcalypse series is one example for me where I enjoyed the initial couple of books but the combination of him going way too heavily into bio-determinist philosophy and just writing in his weirdly misogynistic rape stuff (I'm not sure whether it's him writing his fetish or him just being really committed to expressing the horror of strong bio-determinism) coupled with a completely nihilistic ending actually made the earlier works seem less enjoyable. I know where these plot hooks are going now and the potential not only isn't there but just makes me disappointed.

On the converse side, Brandon Sanderson handles this really well. Most of his books work perfectly well as individual writings you can enjoy in and of themselves but he's gotten really good at weaving them into wider and longer stories. Plot hooks that he sets up do actually get resolved. His stuff, for the most part, isn't high literature and the writing is largely workmanlike but it's all in service to interesting concepts with a well planned plot. The original Mistborn trilogy is one of my favourite examples of series writing: the first book works perfectly just by itself, the second one does drag a bit and could be improved but crucially it sets up everything that happens in the final book. There are a few plot hooks that don't get resolved but they're minor things that you might not really notice and he picks them up in later works rather than just being things he introduced and forgot.

I think George R. Martin is a great writer but he's terrible at plotting and made the awful mistake of writing for a format where plotting is really more important than the writing. And the earlier books do end up suffering in retrospect for that.

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Sky
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Reply #6675 on: January 30, 2023, 06:40:16 AM

I know I'm not in line with a current trend where people want everything explained and closed off otherwise they feel unsatisfied and uncomfortable l, but I'm more than happy for a book or tv series (or painting, thank you Turner) to not be entirely finished and leave something to the imagination. As long as what is there is fun and or interesting why should we really care?
Rendakor
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Reply #6676 on: January 30, 2023, 01:56:32 PM

Not every single detail in the early books needs to be resolved in the later book, but stories without endings are generally unsatisfying to me. That applies equally to TV shows, games, etc. Nowadays I often wait until a media is complete with a solid ending before I even get invested.

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Khaldun
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Reply #6677 on: January 31, 2023, 01:28:59 PM

Definitely agree about Bakker's books, in any event. The ending--or direction--of a series matters, and bad endings definitely retroactively spoil some series if one of the pleasures of the series was the development of various mysteries etc.

The best example I can think of is Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books. The first book is great in its own right. All of humanity from across all of history up to the mid 21st Century wakes up at the same moment on an alien planet that is nothing but a single unspeakably long river. On both sides of the river, there are some banks wide enough to live on, and then past that, unspeakably tall and steep mountains that reach almost into the upper atmosphere. Every person has a personal "grail", a container that they can put into a giant receptacle that is found at frequent regular intervals along the river. Every morning, the grail fills with delicious food, drink, marijuana and tobacco. Mostly people wake up surrounded by people from their rough time period and place, but there are a few outsiders in most places and some strange juxtapositions--8th Century Norse alongside 17th Century Polynesians, etc.

There's one person who knows a bit more. The Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton woke up *before* everyone got to Riverworld, and saw a strange kind of limbo space filled with millions of soon-to-be resurrectees; bald people flying with small devices spotted him and rendered him unconscious again. This makes Burton obsessive about the question of why humanity has been resurrected--he resolves to find out no matter what. He is soon visited by a Mysterious Stranger who hides his identity but encourages him to try to get to the headwaters of the river, and assures Burton that no one can die now--that if you die, you just resurrect in a new part of the river.

Farmer does a great job just playing around with this set-up for the first two books--Burton has a fling with Alice Liddell (the real life inspiration for Alice in Alice in Wonderland), explores the new societies forming along the river, etc. Burton eventually starts to methodically kill himself in order to try and get a respawn close to the headwaters. In the second book, the Mysterious Stranger sends an iron meteorite near to Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) who also insists that he wants to solve the mystery of Riverworld; Clemens and his allies design a riverboat with weaponry adequate to protect them from societies along the banks. It gets stolen anyway (by Hermann Goering, if I remember right) and Clemens builds another riverboat, now motivated by revenge.

Anyway, the first two fantastic books set up the mystery of the Riverworld and make the main characters highly motivated by that mystery. Only it's plain by the time you get to the series conclusion that Farmer himself didn't know what the secret was when he started the series, and his first solution to it is TERRIBLE. It really left everyone with a sour feeling. Farmer himself plainly knew he'd screwed the pooch so he wrote a far better conclusion that just reveals that the first conclusion was a false feint, and this time the solution is pretty decent and the end is satisfying. That made a big difference overall.
Sky
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Reply #6678 on: May 15, 2023, 01:25:38 PM

I don't know if Blake Crouch has been mentioned in the thread, but I'm 2/3rds of the way of burning through his 'big 3' (first Dark Matter, then Upgrade, just started Recursion).

Fast-paced thrillers, scifi and Dark Matter was shelved as a mystery and I'm not mad about it.

Been a while since I've read any scifi that really grabbed me (not counting Zahn/Thrawn, but that was more of a continuation of stuff that grabbed me like ten years ago, though I did finally catch up on them this year).

Leviathan Wakes on deck for when I'm done burning through Crouch (his writing is pretty terse, I read them far quicker than my normal pace).
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Reply #6679 on: May 16, 2023, 10:03:19 AM

If you like Crouch, try the Wayward Pines series of 3 books. They read really fast and are just decent, popcorn lit.

Samwise
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Reply #6680 on: May 16, 2023, 09:03:44 PM

"Finding the Mother Tree" was great. 

Coach Beard had a copy of this book on his desk on tonight’s episode of The Roy Kent Show, further solidifying his position as my favorite non-Roy character.

"I have not actually recommended many games, and I'll go on the record here saying my track record is probably best in the industry." - schild
Mandella
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Reply #6681 on: July 10, 2023, 10:25:05 AM

So it's come to my attention that I should read some Thomas Ligotti. Any suggestions on where to start?
Khaldun
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Reply #6682 on: July 10, 2023, 05:08:56 PM

I'd say The Conspiracy Against the Human Race only I'll tell you I stopped hard on it because I felt it was going to make any depressive feelings I have about ten thousand times worse.
Fraeg
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Reply #6683 on: February 05, 2024, 02:28:14 PM

Been needing some eye bleach reading.  I started with Legends and Lattes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61242426-legends-lattes   and eventually wound up at The Wandering Inn which is, as far as I can tell, a self published free series that you can pay for if you want audio book or a Kindle version.

They can all be read for free here:   https://wanderinginn.com/

I have noticed that the paid Kindle versions of the book are not the same as what is online.  I paid $3.99 for the first two books which clock in at around 3,000 pages so yeah not a bad deal.

It won't change your life but it is a very pleasant and much needed distraction.

"There is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile."
Rendakor
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Reply #6684 on: February 06, 2024, 01:55:15 PM

Legends and Lattes was good, wholesome fun. Haven't read the prequel yet, but my wife loved it.

I just finished Will Wight's Cradle series and enjoyed the hell out of it. I guess the genre's called Progression Fantasy, but it basically reads like a shonen anime. MC starts off weak, gradually becomes more powerful to fight off bigger badass enemies. It's a twelve book series but none of them are incredibly long, with the first one (Unsouled available free with Amazon Prime.

"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
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