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Has anyone ever written a historical novel that's, like, of normal length? (I.e. around 350 pages or less.)
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Mar 26, 2020 16:07
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Has anyone ever written a historical novel that's, like, of normal length? (I.e. around 350 pages or less.) The Dragon Waiting by John M Ford is 365 pages
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Mar 26, 2020 16:18
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StrixNebulosa posted:The Dragon Waiting by John M Ford is 365 pages That's great. Doesn't seem to be a historical novel, though.
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Mar 26, 2020 16:21
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3D Megadoodoo posted:That's great. Doesn't seem to be a historical novel, though. ....oh right! Uh. Sorry. The only historical things I can think of are all chonkers.
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Mar 26, 2020 16:23
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The General in His Labyrinth. Also: lol
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Mar 26, 2020 16:25
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Mira posted:ALSO, any good books about the American Eugenics movement? The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Mar 26, 2020 16:31
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Has anyone ever written a historical novel that's, like, of normal length? (I.e. around 350 pages or less.) almost everything by EL Doctorow
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Mar 26, 2020 16:31
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Has anyone ever written a historical novel that's, like, of normal length? (I.e. around 350 pages or less.) If Rome is ok, the Robert Harris novels are decent and clock in around 400.
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Mar 26, 2020 17:04
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Has anyone ever written a historical novel that's, like, of normal length? (I.e. around 350 pages or less.) Memoirs of Hadrian is around that.
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Mar 27, 2020 01:08
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Franchescanado posted:The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee dope, thanks
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Mar 27, 2020 20:53
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Has anyone ever written a historical novel that's, like, of normal length? (I.e. around 350 pages or less.) It’s been a long time since I’ve read it but I remember really enjoying Augustus by John Williams and it’s between 300-350 depending on which edition you get
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Mar 27, 2020 22:20
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Has anyone ever written a historical novel that's, like, of normal length? (I.e. around 350 pages or less.) The three Centurions books (The Centurions, Barbarian Princess, and The Emperor's Games) are around 350 pages each. The books follow the early career of a pair of centurions around the time of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. I liked them quite a lot, although I haven't picked them up in a few years. They are serviceable books and have decent prose, which sounds like faint praise but books like that can be hard to find. I should give them a re-read. And someone rescued the rights from purgatory and reprinted the set, so you don't have to pay $50 for a used copy of The Emperor's Games any more! The author's name is Amanda Cockrell but the books were published under the pen name "Damion Hunter" because they were published decades ago.
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Mar 27, 2020 23:09
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I just finished Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling and it was fantastic. Immediately recommended it to friends. I read that the collection that it was published under, the New York Review of Books' Classics, are all previously out of print gems, and I'm looking for some reccomendations - not really knowing of any of the authors myself. Can anyone here familiar with the New York Review of Books' Classics reccomend me some of their favourites? I'm sure I could probably pick something at random and it be worthwhile, but I'd still like to hear from someone's experience.
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Mar 29, 2020 03:29
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I was talking about Brothers K a bit ago but with everything going on I’ve been a little too anxious to tackle something big and dense so I’ve been busting out my favorite short stories. I’m reminded of how much I love the shorter works of JD Salinger, Roald Dahl and Stephen King. Favorites of each would have to be For Esmé, Pig and anything spooky like The Mist or The Raft. I know it’s a spotty bit of info but can anyone suggest me short story collections or authors? I also love classics like Kipling.
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Mar 29, 2020 06:05
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Hocus Pocus posted:I just finished Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling and it was fantastic. Immediately recommended it to friends. Yeah, that collection is incredibly well curated. You probably can’t go wrong with any of the books they offer. I’d say that Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt is my favorite from the lot. It’s an astonishingly brutal half-memoir of the author’s WWII experience as an Italian military attaché.
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Mar 29, 2020 09:00
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Rolo posted:I was talking about Brothers K a bit ago but with everything going on I’ve been a little too anxious to tackle something big and dense so I’ve been busting out my favorite short stories. Have you read North American Lake Monsters by Ballingrud yet??
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Mar 29, 2020 21:02
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Nope!
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Mar 29, 2020 22:48
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Rolo posted:Nope! Well do that. It’s an excellent short story collection. Wounds, his other collection, is also good but NALM is like, some next level poo poo.
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Mar 29, 2020 23:13
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Great, thank you!
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Mar 29, 2020 23:31
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Best Ursula K. Le Guin book for someone (me) who hasn't read any of her work?
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Mar 30, 2020 22:01
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C-Euro posted:Best Ursula K. Le Guin book for someone (me) who hasn't read any of her work? A Wizard of Earthsea. It's young adult but very good.
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Mar 30, 2020 22:13
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C-Euro posted:Best Ursula K. Le Guin book for someone (me) who hasn't read any of her work? The Winds Twelve Quarters is a short story anthology with a bunch of stuff that either became novels or was expanded upon in her other work. Otherwise, The Lathe of Heaven for science-fiction or A Wizard of Earthsea for fantasy.
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Mar 30, 2020 22:45
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The Left Hand of Darkness is also an excellent sci fi Le Guin introduction.
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Mar 31, 2020 01:37
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The Dispossessed was my first
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Mar 31, 2020 01:59
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MockingQuantum posted:The Left Hand of Darkness is also an excellent sci fi Le Guin introduction. Yes, this. Followed closely by The Dispossessed.
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Mar 31, 2020 02:45
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Hocus Pocus posted:I just finished Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling and it was fantastic. Immediately recommended it to friends. my favorites from NYRB have been the doll by bolesław prus, zama by antonio di benedetto, private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner by james hogg, envy by yuri olesha, season of migration to the north by tayeb salih, school for fools by sasha sokolov, the foundation pit by andrei platonov, the summer book by tove jansson, and skylark by dezso kosztolanyi augustus by john williams is also good if you're into romans and epistolary poo poo
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Mar 31, 2020 03:09
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Hocus Pocus posted:I just finished Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling and it was fantastic. Immediately recommended it to friends. Curzio Malaparte, Blaise Cendrars, Robert Burton, JA Baker, Patrick White and Camara Laye are all good to excellent authors they've republished, and they're doing new editions of William Gaddis' The Recognitions and JR this year.
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Mar 31, 2020 03:24
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Oh I forgot that Frederick Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh is a nyrb as well, that's a great read if you're into baroque prose or catholic failsons.
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Mar 31, 2020 11:53
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C-Euro posted:Best Ursula K. Le Guin book for someone (me) who hasn't read any of her work? Just to add one more, I started out with the novella The Word for World is Forest.
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Mar 31, 2020 16:08
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Is there any kind of bad place to start LeGuin? Everything of hers that I've read is excellent and I'm not aware of any of her books having a bad reputation.
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Mar 31, 2020 16:49
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Sarern posted:Is there any kind of bad place to start LeGuin? Everything of hers that I've read is excellent and I'm not aware of any of her books having a bad reputation. I bounced off Eye of the Heron at one point, should give it another go sometime
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Mar 31, 2020 17:50
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Confession: I’ve disliked every Le Guin I’ve ever read. They’re all such dry, humourless books. I think that’s part of why they’re received as literature and not genre fiction, but it leaves me cold.
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Mar 31, 2020 17:59
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uh oh prepare to get poo poo on for saying that literature by definition cannot be funny
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Mar 31, 2020 18:16
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Confession: I’ve disliked every Le Guin I’ve ever read. They’re all such dry, humourless books. I think that’s part of why they’re received as literature and not genre fiction, but it leaves me cold. Alright. What do you like reading instead?
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Mar 31, 2020 19:02
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Le Guin is relatively humourless compared to, say, Vonnegut, but with stuff like The Dispossessed that's sort of good because it lets her go way deeper into the political elements that make that whole drama compelling. Susan Cooper is a good reference point because she was writing fantasy and young adult in a similar time period to Le Guin. So is, say, Angela Carter, who was more into fantasy and feminist myth. In all cases you can see a far bigger emphasis on politics and engagement with individuality than in someone like Vonnegut, which makes sense given the context of women writing fantasy in the 60s and 70s. You could look at those three writers almost on a spectrum of fantasy to explicit political mythmaking. Vonnegut, as much as people like him, could have a sense of humour even about horrible things because he was still essentially speaking in the dominant, white male voice of the era he was writing in. With the three female writers I mentioned above there's a much greater... urgency? So some of the dryness might come from wanting to be accepted as a "serious" voice in that era's sexist publishing industry. Carter, notably, is probably the least dry of the three, and she was a radical feminist who didn't really care too much about being accepted by the sexist publishers of the era. There's definitely a sexism that can linger in the criticism of female authors as "humourless" though. If female authors write stuff that's too fantastical, they get dismissed as genre fiction, if they write stuff that's explicitly political they get brushed off as dry. It's the same trope of airhead / humourless bitch that you see all the time in Hollywood films, but more subtle. Wow that turned out to be an effortpost, but basically: female authors have different concerns to male authors, and this is even more true when you're talking about books from the 70s.
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Apr 1, 2020 03:45
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Effortpost to effortpost, I greet you. If we’re talking about female sci-fi authors specifically, I like Joanna Russ and Alice Sheldon (Tiptree). I think they and other minority authors like Delany have a sort of exuberance, liveliness, energy and anger about them that doesn’t come through to me in Le Guin. Humourless is the wrong word; I’m not asking for her to be “funny”. More that I find her writing and characters rigid, intellectualised, anthropologically observed rather than lively and real. I also dislike her habit of writing from the perspective of outsiders or reluctants. I don’t have the books with me to go back to for reference, but with both The Dispossessed and Left Hand, I found myself frustrated by the way she would draw an interesting society, but then make the viewpoint character someone who was conservatively skeptical about or at odds with that society. No! Show me someone who embodies the beliefs of that society, and I’ll play the role of the skeptical observer, please! Don’t stick me with this wet blanket of a character! Incidentally, Delany has a critical essay on The Dispossessed in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw which brings up Le Guin not really inhabiting or examining her societies fully, with questions like - would someone from Anarres really find a soft bed or a made-up woman erotic? (‘“The kind of behavior Vea exhibits toward Shevek men must learn to respond to as erotic. ... Shevek, age forty-two and used to the comparative straightforwardness of sex on Annares, simply has had neither the opportunity nor the motivation to learn to read Vea’s classic cock-teasing as anything but erratic. ... At the risk of rewriting Le Guin’s story, however, somehow it seems more likely that, even drunk and aroused as he is, Shevek would simply burst out laughing at Vea’s antics. ... Then, hopefully, they would have sat down and had some sort of conversation in which they gave each other the very real benefit of their mutually alien views. At any rate, the scene as written—with rampant, primitive lust completely failing to make contact with sophisticated flirtation and coyness—is all “literature.”’) Also on the subject I can recommend Russ’ “To Write Like a Woman”. The essay “What Can a Heroine Do? or, Why Women Can't Write” is very good. Prism Mirror Lens fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Apr 1, 2020 |
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Apr 1, 2020 09:37
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Anybody have a sci fi recommendation for somebody looking for more Stanislaw Lem? I only read The Futurological Congress and seen the film Solaris, but would like a good heady satirical sci fi like him.
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Apr 2, 2020 07:43
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Kart Barfunkel posted:Anybody have a sci fi recommendation for somebody looking for more Stanislaw Lem? I only read The Futurological Congress and seen the film Solaris, but would like a good heady satirical sci fi like him. RA Lafferty.
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Apr 2, 2020 07:55
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Kart Barfunkel posted:Anybody have a sci fi recommendation for somebody looking for more Stanislaw Lem? I only read The Futurological Congress and seen the film Solaris, but would like a good heady satirical sci fi like him. obligatory: quote:Lem singled out only one[35] American science fiction writer for praise, Philip K. Dick, in a 1984 English-language anthology of his critical essays, Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. Lem had initially held a low opinion of Philip K. Dick (as he did for the bulk of American science fiction) and would later claim that this was due to a limited familiarity with Dick's work. More realtalk though first just make sure you've read all the Lem you can find. I don't think he wrote a bad book. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Apr 2, 2020 |
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Apr 2, 2020 17:19
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Kart Barfunkel posted:Anybody have a sci fi recommendation for somebody looking for more Stanislaw Lem? I only read The Futurological Congress and seen the film Solaris, but would like a good heady satirical sci fi like him. John Sladek, definitely, and maybe Robert Sheckley. Oh, and Vonnegut. Some company is reissuing old Lem and going to translate some previously unavailable stuff, btw.
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Apr 3, 2020 09:06
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