Return of the Book Thread

[FatuousTwat]

Just finished the first Chronicles of Amber. I had never read it before, and enjoyed it.

Also read The Player of Games. I'm not sure which I liked better, Player or Consider. I'm getting the rest of the series in a few days from the library, until then I'm reading The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle.

[Johny Cee]

Just finished the first Chronicles of Amber. I had never read it before, and enjoyed it.

Also read The Player of Games. I'm not sure which I liked better, Player or Consider. I'm getting the rest of the series in a few days from the library, until then I'm reading The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle.

The first couple Amber books are amazing.  I kind of peter out on the reread, though...  The second five are alright,  but haven't ever had the desire to reread them.

Zelazny did alot of great stuff.  Lord of Light is amazing.  This Immortal and The Dream-master are pretty good.  Really enjoyed Dilvish the Damned the first time I read it,  but not so much when I read it again.  Zelazny really likes to mix a bunch of spec fiction, scifi, and fantasy, though, if you like to keep your genres separate.

I've wanted to find a copy of A Night in Lonesome October for a long time.... 


I have a copy of Player of Games,  but I'm a little afraid to read it.  The death threats if I don't love it are scaring me away. 

[FatuousTwat]

Read it, then lie if you don't like it. :P

[Viin]

As recommended here, I just finished the Engineer Trilogy by JK Parker. Good stuff, there are some lulls but overall pretty well written. I did think the ending was a little weak, but not an awful wrap up. Almost, but not quite, a steampunk fantasy series. I do recommend it for anyone who likes slightly more complex fantasy than the normal drivel out there.

Picked up the first Mistborn book by Brandon Sanderson on reference by a Facebook contact, of all things.

I also have A People's History of the United States sitting on my nightstand, just waiting for me to pick it up .. but I'm being lazy lately.

[Sky]

I keep thinking the Engineer trilogy should have been better. I can't quite put my finger on exactly why. There were some great scenes, some great plot elements, some great characters, and none of them seemed to evoke much interest while I was reading it. The pacing wasn't too hot, either. I'm thinking maybe it was a case of someone being good at thinking up characters and plots and bad at actually writing it out?

[Viin]

Yah I know what you mean. I can't put my finger on it either ... it's almost like she starts a really good character or plot trend, then it just kinda fizzles with the character doing something or saying things I think are 'out of character' for that person or the story arc just ending without really anything happening.

[Ard]

Picked up the first Mistborn book by Brandon Sanderson on reference by a Facebook contact, of all things.

I just finished the second mistborn book a few weeks ago.  It really feels like a much less pyhrric version of Perdido Street Station to me, although the second book did up the ante in that department a lot.  Have to see how the third book turns out before I can really say for sure that this trilogy doesn't make me want to hang myself like Perdido did.  Like it a lot so far.

[Johny Cee]

Read it, then lie if you don't like it. :P

They'll know I'm lying.  Then I'll have Dave and Ironwood waiting outside my window with knife missiles or something.

[WayAbvPar]

Very excited. Somehow missed the fact that Dresden book 10 came out in paperback on 3-March. When I went to pick that up, also noticed the Glen Cook Black Company omnibuses. Very cool, since a couple of the Books of the South have been out of print and really hard for me to find. Woohoo!

[Ironwood]

Read it, then lie if you don't like it. :P

They'll know I'm lying.  Then I'll have Dave and Ironwood waiting outside my window with knife missiles or something.

No, it's ok.  I'm a massive Banks fan but now I have to admit something :  I picked up Feersum Enjinn for the first time the other week.

...

It was shite.

 

[Soln]

Read it, then lie if you don't like it. :P

They'll know I'm lying.  Then I'll have Dave and Ironwood waiting outside my window with knife missiles or something.

No, it's ok.  I'm a massive Banks fan but now I have to admit something :  I picked up Feersum Enjinn for the first time the other week.

...

It was shite.

 

yes indeed.  I really like Banks, but his output is mixed and that was terrible (I think remembering it correctly).  FWIW Wasp Factory will probably be a post-modern Penguin Classic one day.

[Ironwood]

Further, the most recent one, Matter, wasn't the best either.

So, please, read on and let us know what you really think.  No-one is going to get punched.

[Soln]

Banks' Player of Games is worth reading (a Culture book).

[Murgos]

I'll second Wasp Factory though, or The Bridge.  That is, if you want to try out some of his non-Sci-fi novels.

[JWIV]

Congrats to Tor for finding more ways to milk this even further than Jordan was already doing.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=19734

[FatuousTwat]

Congrats to Tor for finding more ways to milk this even further than Jordan was already doing.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=19734

Fucking Christ.

[Johny Cee]

But my secret shame is that I read my daughter's Urban Fantasy novels after she's done with them, and I generally find them readable (it helps she's no more fond of the purple prose Romance style love scenes than I am, and gets mostly the noirish stuff).  I don't care what genre she thinks Kim Harrison is writing for, I care that the stories are well-written and she avoids the temptation to McGuffin and deus ex machina the hell out of everything, she writes "Urban Fantasy" the way hard sci-fi writers write fantasy, but with deep characters.  Yes, sometimes she'll spend 3 pages discussing the decor, but then she makes it relevant to the plot in ways you don't need an advanced degree in literature to recognize.

Kelley Armstrong is another good one.  Sci-fi has become such a wasteland of warporn and alternate history potboilers, I had to find something new.  Aren't more than 4-6 sci-fi books coming out per year I consider worth reading (Charles Stross being near and dear to my heart, best futurist since the hard sci-fi bloom of the 70's and 80's).  Epic Fantasy is a fucking joke (how many fucking times a year do we need to deconstruct Tolkien?  And why is the decalogy the new trilogy?), Light Fantasy doesn't have enough funny ones anymore (I blame Pratchett, he used up all the good straight lines).

I've read a couple of Kim Harrison's books.  Dropped it in the middle of book 4, I think.  Too much angst.  Too much author wish fulfillment.  I swear to god, virtually every male character was trying to get in the lead's pants by that point, and at least one of the female characters as well.  I seem to remember alot of blatantly dumb male behavior for the sole purpose of giving the lead a chance to rant at said dumb male.

Kelley Armstrong's first book, Bitten, was pretty strong.  Nice take on werewolves, great thematic allegory going with the lead's struggle with what she is and the crisis of identity with modern professional women.  Thought Stolen was solid as well.  I read a couple more, but for me it degraded into decently written formulaic urban fantasy.

There is quite a lot of decent Urban Fantasy around, if you can syphon off the awful supernatural erotica.  Butcher's "Dresden" books, De Lint's early stuff, Huston's books (very dark noir detective), Emma Bull's War of the Oaks.  Even the first bunch of Hamilton's "Anita Blake" books was interesting, before the heroine started solving all her problems by sleeping with anything that walked, ran, or scuttled by.

On scifi:

Read an interesting post on Westeros about the genre's decline.  Pointed out that, in the last 30 years or so, there have only been three great introductory novels that could serve to boost the genre and snag new readers:  Card's Enders Game, Simmons Hyperion, and Morgan's Altered Carbon.  Of those three, Altered Carbon received no where near the level of popularity or attention that you would expect.

In the same time period, you had the fantasy authors firing off piles of major books that developed into long running series (Feist, Jordan, Martin, etc. up to Rothfus, Abercrombie, Lynch)  That's not counting the fact that you have Brooks and Donaldson continuing popular series started in the '70s.

Stross seems to get alot of credit for writing good, interesting scifi that is also attractive to readers new to the genre.  This hasn't been reflected in popularity, though.

Scalzi's Old Man's War and it's followups are pretty strong as well.  Light on technobabble and needless geekery, more focused on themes and characters.

[Johny Cee]

And by the by:

Amazon has the Songs of the Dying Earth anthology as being released July 31.  Contributors:

    * “The Green Bird” by Kage Bager
    * “The Good Magician” by Glen Cook
    * “The Copsy Door” by Terry Dowling
    * “The Last Golden Thread” by Phyllis Eisenstein
    * “The Return of the Fire Witch” by Elizabeth Hand
    * “Grolion of Almery” by Matthew Hughes
    * “Evillo the Uncunning” by Tanith Lee
    * “An Incident in Uskvosk” by Elizabeth Moon
    * “Inescapable” by Mike Resnick
    * “Sylgarmo’s Proclamation” by Lucius Shepard
    * “The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale” by Robert Silverberg
    * “The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz” by Dan Simmons
    * “The Final Quest of the Wizard Sarnod” by Jeff VanderMeer
    * “The Traditions of Karzh” by Paula Volsky
    * “Caulk the Witch-Chaser” by Liz Williams
    * “The Lamentably Comical Tragedy (or The Laughably Tragic Comedy) of Lixal Laqavee” by Tad Williams
    * “Abrizonde” by Walter Jon Williams
    * “Guyal the Curator” by John C. Wright

This should be ridiculously entertaining.

[FatuousTwat]

Sounds good!

[Sky]

Fiancee was ordering some fiction for the library, mentioned there was a new Modesitt (of course, s/he's prolific as heck), and I noticed I missed the Lord Protector's Daughter, a new Corean Chronicles entry. About 60 pages in now. Love Modesitt, basically the same formula redone over, but I enjoy the formula. Light action, good balance to all the non-fic I read.

[FatuousTwat]

So, I'm about halfway done with Use of Weapons, and so far I'm not getting the hate.

[Samwise]

I'm on a Rex Stout kick at the moment, working my way through all the Nero Wolfe books in the SF library (having exhausted the Alameda library while I lived there).  Fucking  .

[Sky]

(having exhausted the Alameda library while I lived there)

Don't forget interlibrary loan (ILL). In a big system like the bay area, that's a whole shitload of books!

[Mosesandstick]

More non-SF!

Re-read Vernon God Fucking Little.

Read a Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Good read, moving and the characters are deep and believable.

[Sky]

Actually, jumping back into Modesitt's formula is bugging me this time. It's like he's giving the characters omniscience. There is one part where the lead character is learning her Talents (ESP type stuff), and she wonders if she'll ever get useful Talents, as if she knows she only has the first few and there are a lot more. Because invisibility, instant travel, and levitation aren't useful, and if you suddenly got them in a world where you've never heard of such things outside legends, the first thing you'd do is bitch you didn't have more. And she just kind of accepts that she can turn invisible if she tries hard enough. Uh....wtf?

Then he's crutching on "old stories", after the antagonist tries to find old stories and comes up empty.

It's still got some interesting parts, but he's gotten real lazy and the plot evolution is extremely thin this time. Ah, well. You write that many and a few are bound to be phoned in, I guess.

[JWIV]

Got this as a Christmas present and just started reading it - American Lion by Jon Meacham.  It's a bit on the light side, serving more as an introduction to Andrew Jackson (most especially his impact on the role of the Executive branch) than an exhaustive discussion of the man; but overall I'm enjoying it. 

[Salamok]

Actually, jumping back into Modesitt's formula is bugging me this time. It's like he's giving the characters omniscience. There is one part where the lead character is learning her Talents (ESP type stuff), and she wonders if she'll ever get useful Talents, as if she knows she only has the first few and there are a lot more. Because invisibility, instant travel, and levitation aren't useful, and if you suddenly got them in a world where you've never heard of such things outside legends, the first thing you'd do is bitch you didn't have more. And she just kind of accepts that she can turn invisible if she tries hard enough. Uh....wtf?

Then he's crutching on "old stories", after the antagonist tries to find old stories and comes up empty.

It's still got some interesting parts, but he's gotten real lazy and the plot evolution is extremely thin this time. Ah, well. You write that many and a few are bound to be phoned in, I guess.

He definitely should have walked away after the 3rd (or was it 1st) book of the Corean Chronicles, starting to look like he will be harping on this world/themes for the next 15 books. At least the Order/Chaos books were self contained stories now he is moving to sets of trilogies.  I suppose more books written= more books sold lets hope he doesn't go all dave duncan on us and rewrite the same book 6 times from different characters points of view.

[Murgos]

I'm on a Rex Stout kick at the moment, working my way through all the Nero Wolfe books in the SF library (having exhausted the Alameda library while I lived there).  Fucking  .

I'm a huge fan of noir fiction from the 30's, love those books.  I've always been tempted to order this:

http://www.amazon.com/Nero-Wolfe-Cookbook-Rex-Stout/dp/1888952245

[Sky]

He definitely should have walked away after the 3rd (or was it 1st) book of the Corean Chronicles, starting to look like he will be harping on this world/themes for the next 15 books. At least the Order/Chaos books were self contained stories now he is moving to sets of trilogies.  I suppose more books written= more books sold lets hope he doesn't go all dave duncan on us and rewrite the same book 6 times from different characters points of view.

I like the world, and I don't mind him framing in trilogies. It's the lazy writing that bugs me, The Lord Protector's Daughter is pretty egregious. It makes me want to rewrite the story properly.

[Johny Cee]

Actually, jumping back into Modesitt's formula is bugging me this time. It's like he's giving the characters omniscience. There is one part where the lead character is learning her Talents (ESP type stuff), and she wonders if she'll ever get useful Talents, as if she knows she only has the first few and there are a lot more. Because invisibility, instant travel, and levitation aren't useful, and if you suddenly got them in a world where you've never heard of such things outside legends, the first thing you'd do is bitch you didn't have more. And she just kind of accepts that she can turn invisible if she tries hard enough. Uh....wtf?

Then he's crutching on "old stories", after the antagonist tries to find old stories and comes up empty.

It's still got some interesting parts, but he's gotten real lazy and the plot evolution is extremely thin this time. Ah, well. You write that many and a few are bound to be phoned in, I guess.

He definitely should have walked away after the 3rd (or was it 1st) book of the Corean Chronicles, starting to look like he will be harping on this world/themes for the next 15 books. At least the Order/Chaos books were self contained stories now he is moving to sets of trilogies.  I suppose more books written= more books sold lets hope he doesn't go all dave duncan on us and rewrite the same book 6 times from different characters points of view.

The first through third books were pretty good.  It was basically the protagonist trying to get back home to his wife during the middle of a war, trying to stay alive and stay true to his morals.  Then the whole wierd beings from alternate dimensions kicked in as the main story...

[Margalis]

Read through 3/4 of Foundation then gave it back to my friend. I thought it was awful. What's the fun in reading about people outsmarting other people when the people being outsmarted are dumb as rocks?

[Samwise]

I'm on a Rex Stout kick at the moment, working my way through all the Nero Wolfe books in the SF library (having exhausted the Alameda library while I lived there).  Fucking  .

I'm a huge fan of noir fiction from the 30's, love those books.  I've always been tempted to order this:

http://www.amazon.com/Nero-Wolfe-Cookbook-Rex-Stout/dp/1888952245

I have that book, and it's fucking awesome.  I've even cooked a few recipes from it and they've all pleased me.  Even the avocados whipped with sugar, lime, and chartreuse, which sounds terrifying but is actually quite tasty.

[Lt.Dan]

No way - you mean there is another use for Chartreuse other than getting mindblowingly shitfaced?

On topic: I'm rereading Cryptonomicon.  It's fantastico .  So much happens in this book that I reckon he should edit the Baroque Cycle books into a single, 1000 page novel - at least then I might finish it.

Also reading 1602, Neil Gaiman's Elizabethan version of the Marvel universe, and just finished Chaos by James Gleick, which is a history of chaos mathematics.  Next on the list is Metamagical Themas by Hofstader. 

[Abagadro]

On topic: I'm rereading Cryptonomicon.  It's fantastico Heart.  So much happens in this book that I reckon he should edit the Baroque Cycle books into a single, 1000 page novel - at least then I might finish it.

If he crystallized it down to just the Jack Shaftoe stuff with a hunk of Waterhouse/Newton, a smidge of Bob Shaftoe, and a dash of Enoch Root it could probably be a great book.  I liked the whole series but the Eliza stuff almost did me in.

[Samwise]

Yes, I had to skim through lots of the Eliza stuff.  The swashbuckling and scientific stuff was great but the political and economic stuff just dragged on forever.  I still liked the Baroque Cycle better than anything else Stephenson has done, though, because it's the only story he's written that he bothered to give a decent ending to.