Return of the Book Thread

[Morat20]

Check the publisher on her paperback. It's self-pubbed by iUniverse. Any insane person can publish their own book these days. 

Oh I know. But it's so bad it's hilarious. Thank god she wasn't an actual teacher, but jesus christ -- it's a book she wrote out of some weird sense of victimization, where she can tell 'her side' and make herself the hero, right?

So the author avatar (fuck if I can remember what she named herself) spends most of the book insulting the principle, other teachers, and other teacher's kids. There's like an entire section where she and her friend basically call one of the other teacher's daughters a slut and white trash.

It's so....unaware, I guess. The prose is bad enough that it could be submitted to that annual contest on bad writing (although not quite bad enough to place), but the worst part is just how bad she sounds as a person. You'd think if you were going to self-publish a book, you'd at least try not to make yourself look like a screaming bitch.

[Margalis]

The wikipedia blurb about jumping the shark is much better than the one quoted previously:

Jumping the shark is an idiom, first employed to describe a moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery.

In its initial usage, it referred to the point in a television program's history where it has "outlived its freshness" [1] where viewers feel "the writers have run out of ideas" and that "the series has [lost] what made it attractive."[2] These changes were often the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose audience had begun to decline.[3]

The "jump the shark moment" is the "wow this got fucking stupid" moment.

Anyway on the subject of books, I started reading Bossypants, it's pretty funny. I also read a few collections of Dick sort stories. I've read a lot of his longer fiction but his shorter fiction only here and there, never in a collected form. I have to say I'm a little disappointed, too many of them read like O Henry stories for my taste.

[HaemishM]

Finished Ender's Game. Am I a bad person because I hated EVERY FUCKING CHARACTER IN THE BOOK? Every fucking one of them. Oddly, I kind of liked the idea of the bugger war and the way it ended. But goddamnit, it's not even that I agree or disagree with the characters or find them reprehensible or not, they just annoy the piss out of me on a cellular level. So what did I start reading after this?

Speaker for the Dead. I seriously must hate myself sometimes. I'm about 100 pages into Speaker and what do you know... I hate every fucking character in it. They are all fundamentally retarded, hate themselves and act not only in complete opposition to logic or reason, but in complete opposition to the way just about anyone would act in their circumstances. It feels like the entire conflict of the story exists only because the characters are  acting like fucking mongoloid genetic defectives. I'm not sure I can finish it but I'm almost positive I won't read another of his works.

[Morat20]

It's okay to hate every character. Especiallly motherfucking Bean.

[HaemishM]

Actually, Bean was the least annoying. At least he showed some spunk. The rest of them were all either total cunts or total whiny cunts.

[bhodi]

Xenocide and the world of path was the absolute worst. I haven't been that angry about an ending since I finished The Amber Spyglass. I hate glorifying ignorance.

[Talpidae]

Actually, Bean was the least annoying. At least he showed some spunk. The rest of them were all either total cunts or total whiny cunts.

Um, No.

Wait till the later books when Card retconns Bean to have been in charge of it all.  ALL OF IT.  You'll shit bricks.

But yes, the Ender Trilogy is a big heap of shite characters, mostly because they're all religious cunts like he is.  The woman who liked getting beaten in Speaker for the Dead (and she's also a WHORE who became a Nun) is the worst of the lot.

[Ingmar]

I hope you're at least reading them in a way that doesn't give that twat any money.

[Morat20]

Actually, Bean was the least annoying. At least he showed some spunk. The rest of them were all either total cunts or total whiny cunts.

My impressions of Bean are colored by later Bean, wherein Orson Scott Card goes back to the well and rewrites Ender's Game from Bean's point of view, wherein you learn Ender was just a pasty to the much, much smarter pair of Bean and Achilles (I think Achilles) and how Bean was, basically, riding controller on Ender to keep him on track.

Later on Bean becomes a giant and rules the Earth or something. I stopped reading them around then.

[HaemishM]

Wait, what? WHAT THE FUCK? Who the fuck is Achilles? Bean rules the world? WTF? W... T... F???

The woman Talpidae is talking about in Speaker is exactly the character that made me go "Oh fuck, not again. These people are ANNOYING."

And the whole Hundred Worlds thing makes no sense. There's no way to immediately travel from one world to another without like 20 years of distance (that only takes weeks in physical time) and yet all these disparate colony worlds haven't rebelled once and broken off? I mean, sure you can administer a world by instantaneous communication with the ansible, but what's to stop the colonies from saying "Fuck off, come get us assgoblins" and turning the damn ansible off while preparing for the entire 20 or 30 years it takes the invasion/peacekeeping force to get there? That setup doesn't make a lot of sense. Should I keep reading this thing or not? Because if it's only going to get worse, I've got books I just nicked from the Borders store closing for 60% off that I'd rather read.

[Rasix]

The last Bean book is basically a giant anti-abortion diatribe.   

[Margalis]

I found Ender's Game extremely boring and condescending and I guessed the ending 1/4 of the way through the book so I never finished it.

I also got a strong sense of "Ender is so smart and great and so much better than everyone else and even though he's a kid he knows much better than authority figures and I THE AUTHOR AM ALMOST CERTAINLY ALL OF THAT AS WELL."

[HaemishM]

Yeah, I get a great deal of Mary Sue from the Ender character, which is part of what pisses me off about the whole thing. Even when he fucks up, he somehow does the right thing. I also get a lot of "socialism = ultimate evil!" from all the adult/government characters in the first book.

I'm going all John Ringo on Orson Scott Card. Just got this book review about Card's retelling of Hamlet. As in "Oh No, Orson Scott, no you didn't."

[Ironwood]

One of my favourite books when I was younger was Treason.  I can't read it as an adult since I now know what it's about.

Card's insane.  I'd give up if I was you.

[shiznitz]

I see that I have missed quite a few Stephen King books over the last few years.  Anyone read them?  Last one I read was Dreamcatcher.

[Ironwood]

Skip them.  He stopped being a good writer when he stopped cocaine.

Cell was Shite and the less said about Buick8 the better.  Just woeful all round.  Hell, Dreamcatcher was fucking nonsense, come to think of it.

[ghost]

Finished Ender's Game. Am I a bad person because I hated EVERY FUCKING CHARACTER IN THE BOOK? Every fucking one of them. Oddly, I kind of liked the idea of the bugger war and the way it ended. But goddamnit, it's not even that I agree or disagree with the characters or find them reprehensible or not, they just annoy the piss out of me on a cellular level. So what did I start reading after this?

Speaker for the Dead. I seriously must hate myself sometimes. I'm about 100 pages into Speaker and what do you know... I hate every fucking character in it. They are all fundamentally retarded, hate themselves and act not only in complete opposition to logic or reason, but in complete opposition to the way just about anyone would act in their circumstances. It feels like the entire conflict of the story exists only because the characters are  acting like fucking mongoloid genetic defectives. I'm not sure I can finish it but I'm almost positive I won't read another of his works.

Again, I was in the exact same boat you are in now.  I finally slogged through it and found I enjoyed it.  I personally wouldn't put Ender's Game in my top 10, or even 50, books, but I still think it's a decent work.  I personally think that if a writer can make me hate all the characters to the level that I did in Ender's Game that he/she has done something right. 

[HaemishM]

I think the last good stuff I read by King was It. Everything after that is mediocre at best, with the exception of the Dark Tower stuff.

[Morat20]

Wait, what? WHAT THE FUCK? Who the fuck is Achilles? Bean rules the world? WTF? W... T... F???

The woman Talpidae is talking about in Speaker is exactly the character that made me go "Oh fuck, not again. These people are ANNOYING."

And the whole Hundred Worlds thing makes no sense. There's no way to immediately travel from one world to another without like 20 years of distance (that only takes weeks in physical time) and yet all these disparate colony worlds haven't rebelled once and broken off? I mean, sure you can administer a world by instantaneous communication with the ansible, but what's to stop the colonies from saying "Fuck off, come get us assgoblins" and turning the damn ansible off while preparing for the entire 20 or 30 years it takes the invasion/peacekeeping force to get there? That setup doesn't make a lot of sense. Should I keep reading this thing or not? Because if it's only going to get worse, I've got books I just nicked from the Borders store closing for 60% off that I'd rather read.

Retcon.

Apparently he wanted to tell Bean's story. Except to make Bean interesting meant either a long "And then Bean went to Battle School and there was that War, and he did very little and frankly you've all heard it". And that doesn't fit in with his Genius Awesome Kid.

So he did a series focusing on Bean where Bean was a genetically engineered super-baby or some shit, avoided being killed because he was a fucked up genetically engineered super baby by hiding in a toilet tank at the age of like 6 months, joined a street gang, got into a rivarly with a kid named Achilles, they all went to Battle School, where Bean was tapped to like handle Ender and keep him from cracking under all the stress.

Cause bean was like a genius but not a leader or some shit.

Then Ender won and the rest of the books were about all of Ender's buddies and Battle School kids getting snapped up by the Earth military to fight wars with each other, but since the kids were all super geniuses they were subverting the process and it was all controlled by Ender's older, sociopathic brother and I think bean was pulling strings behind it all.

The ONLY goddamn interesting bit of all of that was the recognition that once you kicked the alien asses, every country on earth would be scrabbling for all the military geniuses they'd trained since childbirth to be modern Alexander's as the world ripped itself to shreds over a hundred years of pent-up grudges that had been shoved aside in favor of not all dying to aliens.

[proudft]

I'm going all John Ringo on Orson Scott Card. Just got this book review about Card's retelling of Hamlet. As in "Oh No, Orson Scott, no you didn't."

Oh, has OH NO JOHN RINGO NO been covered in this thread before?  'Cause that article was fucking hilarious.   Here it is, in case it wasn't: http://hradzka.livejournal.com/194753.html

I think I have one random book by John Ringo on the Kindle, one of the free Baen ones about aliens and humans fighting a war or something.  Real specific, I know.  It was... okay, not very memorable, though, clearly.   But better than Ender's Game, which I found really rather dull for some reason.  (And I read the short story version of Ender's Game rather than the novel, which I have gathered was the better version anyway).

Stephen King I have a lot of mixed feelings about.  Love a lot of the early stuff, particularly the Stand and the Dead Zone, but everything past The Van Crash, I am pretty meh on.   I do like Tommyknockers and Insomnia quite a bit though, which apparently a lot of fans don't.  I like the first Dark Tower book, but I read the next two and stopped there.  The tone is much different in the first one and I liked it much better.

But the Long Walk needs to be a movie, like, now.  Running Man is great, and in the non-fiction department On Writing is fantastic.  So he's really hit and miss for me.  But that's ok, at least it's not all miss.  I might just like Bachman more than King, really (especially since Misery was supposed to be a Bachman book). 

[Ironwood]

Tommyknockers I loved.  Mostly because it was one of the better portrayals of Alcoholism I've read.

Also, you know, aliens and shit.

[shiznitz]

Skip them.  He stopped being a good writer when he stopped cocaine.

Hell, Dreamcatcher was fucking nonsense, come to think of it.

Nonsense is extreme, but, yeah, it wasn't great.

[HaemishM]

So he did a series focusing on Bean where Bean was a genetically engineered super-baby or some shit, avoided being killed because he was a fucked up genetically engineered super baby by hiding in a toilet tank at the age of like 6 months, joined a street gang, got into a rivarly with a kid named Achilles, they all went to Battle School, where Bean was tapped to like handle Ender and keep him from cracking under all the stress.

Ok yep, I'm out. Fuck this guy.

I think I'll read William Gibson's Zero History.

[ghost]

Tommknockers didn't age well for me.  I liked it when I was 14, but I read it again in the past 5 years and it didn't seem nearly as good.  I really can't stand King now, except for The Stand, which is very good.  I like the Dark Tower books too, but haven't read all of them. 

[Abagadro]

Ok yep, I'm out. Fuck this guy.

That's generally good policy when it comes to Card.

Trying to get into Modesitt's latest SF book and having a hard time. He's turned the inscrutability up to 11 in the first 50 pages.

[Morat20]

So he did a series focusing on Bean where Bean was a genetically engineered super-baby or some shit, avoided being killed because he was a fucked up genetically engineered super baby by hiding in a toilet tank at the age of like 6 months, joined a street gang, got into a rivarly with a kid named Achilles, they all went to Battle School, where Bean was tapped to like handle Ender and keep him from cracking under all the stress.

Ok yep, I'm out. Fuck this guy.

I think I'll read William Gibson's Zero History.

You haven't even gotten to the best series -- his Alvin Maker books. I can't come up with the proper words to describe how truly awful these books are. Effectively, it's Mormon Narnia set in 1700s American in an alternative universe with super-magic mormons.

Abagadro: Empress of Eternity? Yeah, I felt that way most of the way through the book. I suppose one of the reasons I keep reading him is because I want to figure out what the fuck he was doing, which in his defense, you can generally figure out at least by the end.

[shiznitz]

I know Salvatore is generally scorned here, but I found Gauntlgrym to be good.  He seems to be adding a harder edge to Drizzt and the other characters.

[Samprimary]

You haven't even gotten to the best series -- his Alvin Maker books. I can't come up with the proper words to describe how truly awful these books are. Effectively, it's Mormon Narnia set in 1700s American in an alternative universe with super-magic mormons.

Orson Scott Card's "This Book Is Seriously Unfuckingshittingly Entirely About Having A Shit Ton of Babies"

[Abagadro]

Is that his worst or is the Homecoming Series (basically just a retelling of the Book of Mormon)?

[Ironwood]

You haven't even gotten to the best series -- his Alvin Maker books. I can't come up with the proper words to describe how truly awful these books are. Effectively, it's Mormon Narnia set in 1700s American in an alternative universe with super-magic mormons.

Orson Scott Card's "This Book Is Seriously Unfuckingshittingly Entirely About Having A Shit Ton of Babies"

The Indian bits were good.

[Ironwood]

Or you could Try This.

 

[Ingmar]

Just when I think he can't get any more loathesome...

[Abagadro]

Or you could Try This.

 

Hmm.  I just.... Hmmmm.

Dude has issues.

[Ironwood]

Indeed.  Who'd want to rewrite Hamlet ??

[Margalis]

Guys, OSC doesn't hate gay people. I know this is true because he said so once!