Return of the Book Thread

[Morat20]

I've not read Small Gods. I'll check it out. I have read both Canticle for Leibowitz and Lathe of Heaven, and they are both, of course, classics. Along that vein, you might enjoy The Gods Themselves by Asimov. It a 3 part novel, each exploring what god means to three different types of being, human, an omoeba from some wierd planet, and some other being. It sounds kinda dorky, but it good stuff. I didn't even particularly like Asimov's Foundation stuff, but this book was somewhat in a class by itself.

One of my absolute favorite lines from Pratchett comes from Small Gods -- he's discussing the God Om, whose first encounter with humans (and his transition from basically spirit to God -- Gods get their power from belief) came when he encountered a shepard and led him to his lost sheep. That shepard went on to fond an incredibly fundamentalist and repressive religion that became a warlike theocracy, in full belief of "converting by the sword". Om's own sentience started with that single prayer from a shepard.

Pratchett notes: "It might have been different had Om encountered a goatherder, instead of a shepard. For sheep are stupid, and need to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.".

Gods, belief, and the nature of humanity (and the Gods it creates) shows up in a lot of Pratchett -- Hogfather (IE: Santa Claus) talks about it too, from another perspective.

[Riggswolfe]

It reminds me, I still wonder if the Wheel of Time series will be finished. They have one book to go and the author is dying. That said, I'm also having trouble caring.

This is one of the reasons I'm on a short-series/single book kick right now. I hate (HATE!) waiting for the next (and the next, and the next) book to come out, so I've decided I will no longer read a series until it's done. Anything longer than maybe 4-5 books I probably won't finish because the writing typically goes way down hill after the mid-way point through the series.

I've discovered I don't mind it if the books are more or less self contained. In fact, I'm considering taking a look at the Dirk Pitt books by Clive Cussler for that reason, I enjoy series with the same characters. I just am getting like you in that if it is one story stretched out over many books I lose interest and stop caring about the story. Had the Wheel of Time been a trilogy, or hell, even six books it'd have been 1000% better. But so many of the books are nothing but "uh yeah, nothing happens really, Rand worries he's crazy, every female on the planet wants him, the females who don't are busy manipulating people, Matt is nowhere around because he's far too interesting to put into the story, and uh...yeah, that's it."

I just realized. I don't like Rand. I like Min, Matt, Perrin, and Faile. That's it out of all those characters.

[Endie]

I haven't listed all my books on it but here is a good sampling on LibraryThing.

We share 8 books from your 115 or so, which considernig that I've only entered about a twelfth of my collection (and at the rate you read I suspect you're be similarly underrepresented) is not bad going: I'll probably nab quite a few more for my Amazon wish list, cheers!

[Engels]

One of my absolute favorite lines from Pratchett comes from Small Gods -- he's discussing the God Om, whose first encounter with humans (and his transition from basically spirit to God -- Gods get their power from belief) came when he encountered a shepard and led him to his lost sheep. That shepard went on to fond an incredibly fundamentalist and repressive religion that became a warlike theocracy, in full belief of "converting by the sword". Om's own sentience started with that single prayer from a shepard.

Pratchett notes: "It might have been different had Om encountered a goatherder, instead of a shepard. For sheep are stupid, and need to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.".

Gods, belief, and the nature of humanity (and the Gods it creates) shows up in a lot of Pratchett -- Hogfather (IE: Santa Claus) talks about it too, from another perspective.

Oh, I might actually have read Small Gods, since I'm a voracious reader of all things Pratchett. There are so many of them that they often blurr.

To briefly get back to the Dune series in this context, one of the things that Herbert does differently than most authors is to create a viable God within his books. Whereas the other books we've mentioned either parody religion's attempt to understand a god, or loosely work within preconceived notions of spirituality, Herbert really makes the god from whole cloth. In the first books, the Dune series relies rather heavily on Shiia Muslim mythology, but by the end of the series a whole new godhead has been created. Its told so elaborately, so painfully and with so much 'theological imagination' that its a really mind-blowing experience if you're into that sort of thing. I came to fully grasp how a people's entire life could be inextricably tied to a belief in a force far greater than themselves. I'm not talking about some platitudes muttered at an AA meeting, or even the fundamentalist ravings of our extremists from planet earth, but a real complete psychic subjugation of your being to a god.

As a Christian, this was both fascinating and disturbing to me. There's no tongue-in-cheek with Herbert here; he's not mocking religion, he's not trying to found a new religion either. He's simply painted a nearly perfect belief system based on a strange animal and the spice it produces. By the end of the books, I too loved this god and within the universe of Dune, it all made complete sense. To a modern reader like myself, that cherry picks his bible for 'relevance' in this complicated age, it was a rewarding and mind altering experience that couldn't simply be comparmentalized in my mind. If science fiction's mainstay is 'what if', Herbert's is 'what IF'.

[RhyssaFireheart]

I haven't listed all my books on it but here is a good sampling on LibraryThing.

What an awesome link!  I'm going to have to spend some time on there and list all my books, which will probably take several days if I'm lucky.

[Viin]

http://www.librarything.com/groups/f13

[murdoc]

http://www.librarything.com/groups/f13

This is going to take up quite a few hours...

[WayAbvPar]

Added a few off the top of my head. Pretty sure the ISBNs aren't exact, but the books themselves in the library are. Will add more later.

[Viin]

They seem to group the same books but different ISBNs (hardback, paperback, mass market, etc) under the same 'book' so you might be OK.

You guys work fast!

Members: endie, WayAbvPar, viin
Member library: 826 books

*Someone* added a lot, I only had 50 some before lunch.

[Merusk]

That's a pretty cool little tool. Added most of my top shelf. The other 3 and the shelves downstairs will have to wait, as typing in ISBN numbers is tiresome.

 - It's Endie what upped the list.  Looks like he's been a member for a while as he has 696 books in his profile.

[Sky]

typing in ISBN numbers is tiresome.

Ahh, cool toy. I should show this to my fiancee (the librarian). She probably knows about it already.

I could snag a barcode reader from work and automate ISBN entry! 

[Merusk]

It's also incredibly fun to find out only 100 or maybe even 14 other folks own the same book, and then check out their libraries.  Where the two intersect is sometimes very odd when you look at the whole. 

For example, check out the folks who also own "The Castle: An Illustrated History of the Smithsonian Building" with me.

[Chimpy]

Worst thing about this library thing thing is that all my books are in storage so I can't enter the actual editions I have :(

Second worst is trying to remember exactly what books I do have.

[Viin]

Worst thing about this library thing thing is that all my books are in storage so I can't enter the actual editions I have :(

Second worst is trying to remember exactly what books I do have.

Don't go too crazy. Go look at one of your books on the site .. you'll see it'll list every single edition of the book (it groups ISBNs together). You can select the book cover of the edition you have if that makes you feel better.

[Endie]

That's a pretty cool little tool. Added most of my top shelf. The other 3 and the shelves downstairs will have to wait, as typing in ISBN numbers is tiresome.

 - It's Endie what upped the list.  Looks like he's been a member for a while as he has 696 books in his profile.

I have about 6000 still to enter  .  I need that barcode scanner before that ever happens, though...  It's been sitting on 670 or so until today for months.

[Abagadro]

I give away all the books I read except very select ones I know I will read again. A good chunk of the local library's sci-fi section is made up of former books of mine.

[Chimpy]

I am about to pop an artery at the level of horridness of the entries for a lot of books. I am probably going to go through and manually enter all my books properly once I move into a place I can actually set up my bookshelves in.

You would think that people who read enough to use a site like this would know at least a little about bibliographic conventions.

Maybe I should have been a librarian /shrug.

[Endie]

I give away all the books I read except very select ones I know I will read again. A good chunk of the local library's sci-fi section is made up of former books of mine.

I just can't do that.  It would give me a huge amount more space in my house, but I have the greatest of difficulty throwing away even the most awful of books. 

Here is an example: Amazon recommended an alternate history novel to me last year, saying that since I'd read some counterfactual history, and some SM Stirling and Harry Turltedove novels, maybe I'd like this...  I was off on holiday for a fortnight, and that requires a lot of books, so i ordered.  Three pages in, the author is coming up with phrases about "the threatening negroid faces Hans saw every morning from his BMW, leering at him indolently as he passed", only with worse spelling; four pages in and only puzzled bemusement has kept me going to the point where we discover that the protagonist had tried to make peace with the African immigrants who had swamped Germany, only to have his daughter marry one and then be gang-raped to death by his friends.  Uhhh.  Apparently he then goes back in time and tells Hitler what to do.  It is sooo self-published.

In my defence, the title was The Lion Is Humbled: What If Germany Defeated Britain in 1940?

Anyway, i still have that book.  I read about four pages, and will never read the rest.  It's a condition, I suspect.  I justify it by saying "well, what if I'm writing about neo-fascism in the world of self-publishing some day?"  But it's just a compulsion.

Self-Justificatory Edit:  I never read that synopsis.  I'm not sure it was even there.  I think that I would have noticed that "Scientists from the 22nd century implant a micro computer chip into Hitler's brain" meant we weren't looking at an essay on counterfactual history.  It was the colon in the title that fooled me.

[Ironwood]

Hmmm, on that note, I have a shit-ton of Star Trek, Star Wars and other nerdy coffee-table books in carboard boxes in my garage.  I was saving them for the day of the great burning, but that's just because I got a degree and realised my filthy wee literary pleasure was FILTHY.

Only good stuff stays on the shelf.  And even then, they get cycled.  (Tap for Two, Discard a Book, Return another Book to your hand.)

[Endie]

Well, that wasn't as bad as I suspected.  I pressed post and immediately thought "shit, this is Ironwood's primetime and you just owned up to possessing fascist propaganda."  I looked at the top of the page: "Endie, Ironwood and 0 Guests are viewing this topic".  I checked the board user list: "Ironwood... Posting in Return of the Book Thread".  No time to edit my entry to say "haha... I have Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time and never read it but don't throw it away, silly me."  It was as if an icy hand had gripped me.

[Ironwood]

You're a strange man.

[Furiously]

Nice to see The Black Company being mentioned, that's a very underrated series.

Didn't notice if anyone mentioned Snow Crash by Bruce Sterling..have seen alot more about it in the last 5 years, it went semi-unnoticed for quite some time.  One of the top 5 or so cyberpunk novels of all-tiiiiime.

Feist's Fairy Tale, as mentioned above, is an extremely good book.  Probably the best of Feist.

As an aside, I was in an airport a few weeks back and picked up a certain Star Wars novel for the hell of it, had never read one before...won't give the title just in case someone is reading the series but, they KILLED CHEWY in the book.  I was tempted to burn it immediately; you wanna play around with characters, fine, but you don't F- with the wookiee.

It's too bad Green Monster Games has not been around for a while...

[RhyssaFireheart]

http://www.librarything.com/groups/f13

I joined the group as well, but I need to get the wireless set up on the laptop so I can sit downstairs in the front room and pull books off my shelves to enter them.  I only entered a few I remembered off the top of my head.  I've got around 800 paperbacks that I've kept, so I'm thinking I'll need a lifetime subscription to enter them all.  Actually, that's not a bad idea really, that way if anything ever happens to my collection, I'll have a listing of some sort out there.  And it's a much nicer way of recording them all versus using an ex-hell spreadsheet.

[Furiously]

You know what would be totally cool - if they rented barcode scanners there...

[bhodi]

Boo. I do bookcrossing. I'm not entering stuff twice.

[Viin]

If you could import/export csv files this wouldn't be a problem at all .. Seems bookcrossing is mostly UK folks, but it's an interesting idea.

[Endie]

All you need to do is go to Librarything's universal import page and work out which is the best route.  If bookcrossing allows an export, use that.  If not, use the url function to have LibraryThing scrape the ISBN numbers directly from the page (or pages, if you can't list them all).  It just finds all the ISBN numbers on a page or in a file and removes duplicates.  You could even just view the html of the page when you have it loaded (if they're using some horror like frames) and paste it into the text field importer.

Aside: I always think ISBNs should be long-range nuclear missile boats.

[Bunk]

This is cool, I'll have to wait to get home to actually fill it in, but it shouldn't be too hard since most of my books are still neatly in boxes from moving.

[HAMMER FRENZY]

I am actually getting into reading again. I like horror novels and mystery stuff. Any suggestions?

[Ironwood]

Since you're a Zombie buff, pick up World War Z.  Further, the Mordants Need is now out in a single volume, pick that up, even though it's got nothing to do with your likes.

Everyone should read Mordants Need.

[Viin]

Does Chuck Palahniuk count as Horror?

[Margalis]

I am actually getting into reading again. I like horror novels and mystery stuff. Any suggestions?

I can't suggest Clive Barker highly enough, especially the Books of Blood short story collections. You can order the first collection from Amazon and the second from Amazon UK. (Books of Blood Omnibus)

[Sky]

WWZ was a great book. I just finished Roadside Picnic, led there by Stalker (the game) <- Stalker (the movie) <- Roadside Picnic (the book). Very short, but very entertaining.

From the sounds of it, I kinda wish Stalker (the game) had stuck a bit closer to the original setting rather than make it about Chernobyl.

[dusematic]

I've discovered I don't mind it if the books are more or less self contained. In fact, I'm considering taking a look at the Dirk Pitt books by Clive Cussler for that reason,

Don't do it.

[Bunk]

I've always enjoyed Robert R. McCammon for the horor genre. Also, Dan Simmons. Really enjoyed Carrion Comfort by Simmons.