Return of the Book Thread

[Johny Cee]

Just finished reading Stephen King's latest, Under the Dome.

It was interesting enough, but a bit of a retread on things he has done before. The one thing that really stood out for me in the book was that it really lacked that sense of the other that King can actually do quite well. He created an interesting situation, people reacted as they tend to in his hands, and then it wrapped up in a neat Stephen King package; but it never really had  that special sauce that he can do well. I don't know how to define the mood he can hit, it's not really horror, dread, or foreboding... perhaps doom?

This book didn't have it. Nice read though.

and now... a challenge!

About three years ago someone told me about a book and I promptly forgot the name of the author, series, and characters.

The basic play of it was something like God comes down to earth when he tosses Adam and Eve out of Eden. Not as the all powerful creator, but as the "Hey, let's see what happens next!" friend along for the ride.

My memory tells me it was done by someone who's known for fantasy/sci-fi normally.

Any help?

Sounds like something Christopher Moore would write.

[Reg]

You aren't thinking of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are you?

edit: Even if that's not it - go ahead and read it anyway.  It's one of my favourite books of all time. I reread it every couple of years.

[Quinton]

Yeah, he's not describing Good Omens, but I'll second Good Omens as great stuff.

[Grimwell]

I looked, it's not Good Omens.

Sadly, I don't smoke pot so it wasn't good weed either. The book exists somewhere. ;)

[pxib]

Well over the past few years we've had Gioconda Belli's Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand amd R. Crumb's Book of Genesis, but neither of those sound like what you're describing though.

[Endie]

and now... a challenge!

About three years ago someone told me about a book and I promptly forgot the name of the author, series, and characters.

The basic play of it was something like God comes down to earth when he tosses Adam and Eve out of Eden. Not as the all powerful creator, but as the "Hey, let's see what happens next!" friend along for the ride.

My memory tells me it was done by someone who's known for fantasy/sci-fi normally.

Any help?

David Maine's "Fallen"?

[Sky]

Not as the all powerful creator, but as the "Hey, let's see what happens next!" friend along for the ride.

God:



Actually that's a comforting thought.

[Murgos]

Ok, where is the web-rational for The Dude as god?  I know you didn't just pull that out of your butt at random, you had to have seen it somewhere.

[Johny Cee]

Finished Huston's The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death.  Wonderful read.  Crime fiction with an asshole main character that is really about recovery from a traumatic event.  Have his Sleepless to start today, and really looking forward to it.  The title relates to the fact the protagonist has taken a job as a crime scene cleaner.

I also really enjoyed Mieville's The City & the City.  I think it gets classified as weird fiction, but it's really very tough to categorize. 

[Jherad]

Ok, where is the web-rational for The Dude as god?  I know you didn't just pull that out of your butt at random, you had to have seen it somewhere.

http://www.dudeism.com/index.html

?

[dd0029]

I have always wondered how James Patterson wrote all of those books.

The New York Times Magazine helpfully answered that question.

Here's a key portion.

TO MAINTAIN HIS frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course.

....

The way it usually works, Patterson will write a detailed outline — sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced — and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary, rewrite. When he’s first starting to work with a new collaborator, a book will typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes more efficient. Patterson pays his co-authors out of his own pocket. On the adult side, his collaborators work directly and exclusively with Patterson. On the Y.A. side, they sometimes work with Patterson’s young-adult editor, who decides when pages are ready to be passed along to Patterson.

[HaemishM]

 

He's turned into Don Pendleton.

[Ingmar]

Or the guy who writes Garfield.

[Johny Cee]

Erickson's latest is in bookstores now.  Despite loving the early books in the series, I'm just not that motivated to pick it up.  Reaper's Gale and Toll the Hounds were just such uninteresting blocks of text liberally threaded with juvenile philosophical mutterings....

[Lt.Dan]

Just finished reading The Quiet War by Paul McAuley.  Pretty decent read.  Takes a little while to get science fictiony but the plot and characters are interesting.  For a change the main characters are actually flotsam in the greater scheme of things and spend most of their time making the best of worsening circumstances.  Makes a change from the plot revolving around the actions of the characters.

Next in the reading queue is Superfreakonomics, then Game of Thrones, then Ratio (Michael Ruhlman's cooking shortcut).  and then my next Amazon order will have arrived 

[ghost]

Just finished Dune audiobook, now am going with Paul of Dune.  It's not bad, really.  Certainly, not of the same level of writing as the Herbert books, but it isn't the level of shit that some of Anderson's stuff usually is.

[Sky]

Ok, where is the web-rational for The Dude as god?  I know you didn't just pull that out of your butt at random, you had to have seen it somewhere.

Actually, I did, based on the quoted text. Sounded like a Dude-like god. Good to know others have seen the light, though.

I have always wondered how James Patterson wrote all of those books.

I know more than I want to about best-selling fiction authors. Bane of having a fiction librarian for a fiance.

[Morat20]

Anyone have a Kindle? My wife got one, I'm thinking I'll pick one up solely in the interests of trying to reduce the load on already sagging bookcases stuffed into every wall of my house.

I figured "The Book Thread" might be a place to solicit some opinions about e-readers.

My initial thoughts, just from playing with her Kindle, is I like the e-paper and battery lifespan. I'm not 100% thrilled with the availability of books (lots of authors have nothing, some have all their works, some have the weirdest collection of some old stuff, some new stuff, and just big gaps).

It appears as though I could transition Jim Butcher entirely to Kindle, same with Stross. Modesitt (whose books take up WAY too much room) is sadly lacking. I didn't think to look up Robert Jordan -- which I should have, because ditching those (almost all in hardback) would free up a ton of shelf room.

Last I heard, Amazon's gotten into a slapfight with McMillian over pricing, so the McMillian books are no longer available.

I thought about an iPad, but quickly realized an iPad isn't an e-reader, and what I wanted was an e-reader. As in "not backlit, light and small, long battery lifespan, and dedicated to books".

[Engels]

I have a kindle 2 and I love it. I recently got a hardcover book for xmas, and I can't wait to finish it just so I can go back to Kindle. Never thought I'd say that.

That said, there was an announcement this morning that Amazon rolled over on publisher pressure and is no longer going to be offering books at the discounts they were.

[Ingmar]

e-reader thread:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16287.0

[Morat20]

e-reader thread:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16287.0

Thanks!

[Samwise]

I discovered recently that my favorite author has been recording himself reading some of his out of print books and putting them on his website for free.  So I loaded up the iPod with Lizard Music, which I think is the first novel I ever read.  It's been long enough since I last read it that I only remembered the vague outlines of the plot, so it was almost like picking it up fresh.

If anything I think I liked it more this time around than I did when I was five.  I should try to find a decent used copy of the actual book.

[ghost]

Anyone have a Kindle? My wife got one, I'm thinking I'll pick one up solely in the interests of trying to reduce the load on already sagging bookcases stuffed into every wall of my house.

I would recommend not getting a Nook, at least until they get some of the software kinks worked out. 

[Johny Cee]

Erikson's latest is in bookstores now.  Despite loving the early books in the series, I'm just not that motivated to pick it up.  Reaper's Gale and Toll the Hounds were just such uninteresting blocks of text liberally threaded with juvenile philosophical mutterings....

Well.  I broke down and purchased Dust of Dreams, even after hearing that the first portion of the book is "slow".  There are some glimmers of Erikson moving back to story/plot focused writing, but I shut down a couple of hundred pages in.

To the good, it motivated me to take George MacDonald's Lilith off of the bookshelf where it's been resting for about a year and read it through.  It's proto-secondary world fantasy written in the 19th century, with a heavy Biblical base.  Interesting enough, didn't love it....  can really see how it influenced CS Lewis and the rest.

Maybe next time I try Dust of Dreams it will bore me into reading Gormenghast!

Had to put Huston's Sleepless down as well.  It's good, but very depressing....  Near future apocolypse storyline where large percentages of the population is infected with a prion disease causing sleeplessness, insanity and death.  Quarantine measures and paranoia have shut down global trade, and there is mass hysteria and civil insurrection.

The protagonist is an undercover cop whose wife and infant are both exhibiting signs of the incurable disease, while LA is swiftly breaking down into anarchy.  His mission is to investigate and breakup any illegal sales of the one (massively rare) drug that helps to alleviate some of the symptons of the prion disease.

For fun reading, picked up the novel that The Witcher was based off of.  I hope it will be gloriously awful and mindlessly entertaining!


For the Brits here, has anyone picked up Dan Abnett's new novel Triumff?  It's a stand-alone (as opposed to the Warhammer stuff) set in an alt-world steampunk Victorian setting... 

[lamaros]

I recently read Time of My Life the Swayze thingo. Pretty poorly written, which is just such a surprise.

Read Ishiguro's Nocturnes, which I didn't really like that much at first, but it's stayed in my head a bit so I guess it was worth it. He's not nearly as annoying with his writing style in it as I've found him in his novels, but he's also a bit light on at points, and just a bit too contrived.

Read Cook's Sweet Silver Blues finally, and loved it. Thanks for the recomendations people. Ordered the next three in the series from Bookdepository.co.uk and they arrived within a week! $21AU for three new books is pretty darn good and I'm looking forward to them. Really hanging out to get the new Bledsoe book in paperback...

Reading The Rum Diary at the moment. About 70 pages in and I'm actually pretty... well... bored, honestly. Hopefully it picks up or it's over to Cook for me.

RE: Dune!

Dune is Dune (I'm in the read it at least once a year club, for the last 15 years), but I think some of the others are pretty great. I think Messiah is a good book (though that's because it draws stuff out of the first book, it's certainly not able to stand up on its own) and I'd re-read it ahead of any of the others. I normally stop with it when I do my yearly re-read. Chapter House can be fun, but it can be a drawn out slog to get there, with the other books being half genre entertainment and half exigesis for the first two in my mind (which gets increasingly trying with every re-read).

But if you've never read the whole lot through, do so.



I think Children is probably the worst of the lot, Stilgar and Idaho being the only points of interest for me in that story, while

[Johny Cee]

Read Cook's Sweet Silver Blues finally, and loved it. Thanks for the recomendations people. Ordered the next three in the series from Bookdepository.co.uk and they arrived within a week! $21AU for three new books is pretty darn good and I'm looking forward to them. Really hanging out to get the new Bledsoe book in paperback...

Glen Cook should pay me fucking commissions.  I love the Garrett books, but a fraction of the people that have read Black Company have read them.  My one real criticism, after reading Chandler, is maybe it reads a little too much like Chandler.

The "Garrett" books have been collected in omnibus a couple of times by the Scifi book club at three books a pop, so maybe check the used listings on an Amazon or Ebay to see if you can save a couple bucks.  The only really mediocre to poor book in the series is Petty Pewter Gods which falls in the middle, but the first 6 or so are all top notch.

Also, I'll recommend Steven Brust's "Vlad Taltos" books.  It's first person with some noir sensibilities meets a science-fantasy world.  Reads more like (good) Zelazny or Wolfe than the old hard-boiled stuff.  There's some clever meta-plotting that goes on throughout the series, and the books aren't in chronological order.

Yah, it's a series that's been going on for 25 years not told in chronological order with a minimum of retconning.

[Reg]

The Vlad Taltos books are good stories and pleasantly short. It's a nice change to read a book that doesn't feel the need to be a thousand page epic. I've just finished catching up with the series after losing track of it 10 or 15 years ago. I think he took an extended break from Vlad while he was writing the Phoenix Guards - which is also a good book and in the same universe as Vlad Taltos even though it's a thousand page epic.

[Johny Cee]

The Vlad Taltos books are good stories and pleasantly short. It's a nice change to read a book that doesn't feel the need to be a thousand page epic. I've just finished catching up with the series after losing track of it 10 or 15 years ago. I think he took an extended break from Vlad while he was writing the Phoenix Guards - which is also a good book and in the same universe as Vlad Taltos even though it's a thousand page epic.

Phoenix Guard (and the sequals) are in the same world, but 500 to 1000 years before the Vlad books.  Drastically different style of writing....  It's told as Dumas homage historical fiction being written by an inworld historian from Vlad's time.  It apes Dumas' style pretty well, which for me varies between delightfully breezey to "get on with it".

Brust has had a bunch of health issues in recent years, plus sorting out the breakup of his marriage (Teckla was actually autobiographical).

Have you got to Orca yet?  One of my favorite mind screws ever, as it changes how you should read every book written before it.

[Reg]

I'm sure I read Orca years ago but I don't remember what you're referring to. Once I finish Jhegaara I think I'll go back and re-read the whole series from the beginning to refresh my memory.

[Johny Cee]

I'm sure I read Orca years ago but I don't remember what you're referring to. Once I finish Jhegaara I think I'll go back and re-read the whole series from the beginning to refresh my memory.

[Ingmar]

Phoenix Guards is far and away the best thing he's ever written FWIW, I recommend it highly. (Sadly, unavailable on the Kindle last I checked.)

I actually disliked the Orca twist personally, he falls back on his super-characters far too much.

[Reg]

Hah, holy crap I have no memory of that twist at all! It sure does change how I should interpret events in the other books.  I guess I'd better raise the priority of the series re-read.

I really enjoyed the Phoenix Guards and 500 Years After as well. The Three Musketeers style of writing he used was entertaining to me though I suspect some might be annoyed by it.

[murdoc]

I really enjoyed the Phoenix Guards and 500 Years After as well. The Three Musketeers style of writing he used was entertaining to me though I suspect some might be annoyed by it.

Count me as one of the annoyed. I absolutely love the Vlad books, but could not finish the Phoenix Guards. The writing style annoyed the Hell out of me and I found I wasn't reading it out of enjoyment, but because I felt I aught to.

[naum]

Not a big fiction reader, though I like SF/Fantasy, but even then, outside of a few authors (i.e., Douglas Adams (who really doesn't "fit"), William Gibson, Robert Jordan (the first couple of books…), Frank Herbert (again, 1st book awesome, successive volumes not so enamored with…), Tad Williams, Neil Gaiman (some)).

But this series in progress by Daniel Suarez is awesome…

√ Daemon
√ Freedom

A snippet from the jacket/web promo…

Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer—the architect behind half a dozen popular online games. His premature death from brain cancer depressed both gamers and his company’s stock price. But Sobol’s fans weren’t the only ones to note his passing. He left behind something that was scanning Internet obituaries, too—something that put in motion a whole series of programs upon his death. Programs that moved money. Programs that recruited people. Programs that killed.

Confronted with a killer from beyond the grave, Detective Peter Sebeck comes face-to-face with the full implications of our increasingly complex and interconnected world—one where the dead can read headlines, steal identities, and carry out far-reaching plans without fear of retribution. Sebeck must find a way to stop Sobol’s web of programs—his Daemon—before it achieves its ultimate purpose. And to do so, he must uncover what that purpose is . . .

In other words, savant game maker unleashes AI Jesus…

Far fetched poppycock, yes. But it's plausible enough to keep you turning pages…

Only gripe might be that it's laden with hacker-jargon that might turn non-IT savvy folks off — Suarez not afraid to toss TCP/IP, WPA, encryption schemes, etc.… into the prose…

[WayAbvPar]

I really enjoyed the Phoenix Guards and 500 Years After as well. The Three Musketeers style of writing he used was entertaining to me though I suspect some might be annoyed by it.

Count me as one of the annoyed. I absolutely love the Vlad books, but could not finish the Phoenix Guards. The writing style annoyed the Hell out of me and I found I wasn't reading it out of enjoyment, but because I felt I aught to.

I felt the exact same way. I have enjoyed everything else from Brust, but the Phoenix Guards stuff bored me to tears.