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Lunsku posted:Pratchett I really should get around to finally. Heinlein.. eh, dunno about that. The Starship Troopers movie is great, don't bother reading the book.
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Nov 27, 2023 17:25
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I finished Curse of the Mistwraith by Janny Wurts and didn't enjoy it enough to continue the series. The main antagonist is literally fog. There's a climactic battle at the end of the book which was exciting but it took far too long to get there.
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Nov 27, 2023 18:11
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I read "Hench" the superhero villain book and while I liked the concept a lot it was very very... millennial? Really annoyed by books that have the characters constantly amused by eachother's banter when the banter isn't actually funny. Recurring "bff texting" segments also not my favorite. But a henchman rising through the ranks is a fun concept so I will call it a solid maybe depending on your tolerance for the above kinda thing
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Nov 27, 2023 18:41
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MockingQuantum posted:I guess there's some sex weirdness but it's more of an issue of a man trying to write a theoretical woman's perspective on hypothetical sexual politics, rather than weird, uncomfortable pairings or insinuations (I think, if there was anything really cringey I have since blocked it out of my memory)
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Nov 27, 2023 18:51
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mewse posted:I finished Curse of the Mistwraith by Janny Wurts and didn't enjoy it enough to continue the series. The main antagonist is literally fog. There's a climactic battle at the end of the book which was exciting but it took far too long to get there. While acknowledging that I loved that book and am biased.... why didn't you enjoy the antagonist being fog? That's weird and cool imho. More books should have weird poo poo like that.
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Nov 27, 2023 20:01
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She boobed breastily even in her death
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Nov 27, 2023 20:02
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AARD VARKMAN posted:I read "Hench" the superhero villain book and while I liked the concept a lot it was very very... millennial? I enjoyed Hench quite a lot, and the author won points with me when she replied to a tweet I made (and hadn't tagged her in or anything, so there was no expectation of response) about how I was a bit thrown by there not being a macron included whenever she used the word Māori by saying that she'd spoken to her publisher and would get the macron added in future printings. But I agree that it's definitely Millennial Fiction, sorta like a sci fi Sally Rooney. Also the protagonist's surname being Voldemort spelled backwards is dumb.
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Nov 27, 2023 20:05
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AARD VARKMAN posted:I read "Hench" the superhero villain book and while I liked the concept a lot it was very very... millennial? Is the henchman a yellow, overall-wearing cyclops?
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Nov 27, 2023 20:08
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I had heard that Best Served Cold was getting a movie adaptation, but this is the first I've heard of a First Law adaptation https://twitter.com/TommyArnoldArt/status/1729169913401741592 e: ah, they are for a new illustrated edition  Ferro and the Bloody-Nine on the cover zoux fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 20:19
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StrixNebulosa posted:While acknowledging that I loved that book and am biased.... why didn't you enjoy the antagonist being fog? That's weird and cool imho. More books should have weird poo poo like that. Fog with malicious intent isn't a very interesting villain. I think it's deep in the 2nd half of the book when there is finally confrontation between the protags and the fog, and it shows one of the wizards having his powers stripped away while he closes the portal the fog came from. I think my point is better made by this review by Mark Lawrence, and this review probably unfairly influenced my opinion but I just didn't enjoy the book. I didn't really like the writing style or the plot or the characters, not enough to put the book down but enough that I won't continue with the series.
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Nov 27, 2023 20:48
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Finished Mona Lisa Overdrive today and thus the entire Sprawl trilogy. What the hell was Continuity's motivation? I thought it might have been trying to protect Angie but Brigitte explicitly says it let Lanier fall under 3Jane's control, so I have no idea any more
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Nov 27, 2023 20:54
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I can never not read janny as jenny it's weird
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Nov 27, 2023 20:54
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zoux posted:I had heard that Best Served Cold was getting a movie adaptation, but this is the first I've heard of a First Law adaptation These are cool but I like the roughs more than the finished illustrations, Logen looks far too young.
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Nov 27, 2023 21:04
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Eversion by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NKRN9WF/ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1) by Becky Chambers - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZP64F28/ The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0011UJM48/ The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NFHF0Q/ The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QVGZKS9/ The sama author as Spear Cuts through Water but I haven't heard any discussion. CIRCE by Madeline Miller - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074M5TLLJ/ Akata Witch (Nsibidi Scripts #1) by Nnedi Okorafor - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004IYJEG0/ The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07M77XW56/ The Getaway God (Sandman Slim #6) by Richard Kadrey - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L192HCI/ How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092VY49LZ/ The Shadow of the Gods (Bloodsworn #1) by John Gwynne - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HLQL1B2/ Kings of the Wyld (The Band #1) by Nicholas Eames - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KT7YTXW/
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Nov 28, 2023 00:13
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pradmer posted:Eversion by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NKRN9WF/ 
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Nov 28, 2023 00:42
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Is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet good? The Graveyard Book and Ocean at the End of the Lane are probably the last things Gaiman has made that I really liked. I think I've brought it up here before but my personal conspiracy theory is that the latter is based on his daughter not liking Amanda loving Palmer.
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Nov 28, 2023 01:05
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Chairman Capone posted:Is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet good? It feels like Serenity/Firefly - a gang of outcasts on a ship creating a surrogate family. Cozy and enjoyable.
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Nov 28, 2023 01:08
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I enjoy Long Way a lot though I think the 3rd and 4th books in the series are the best. All 4 of the books are trying to do very different things and have a pretty thin connective tissue, but if you like one I'd definitely at least try the rest. For 1.99 I'd definitely go for it.
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Nov 28, 2023 01:15
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mewse posted:Fog with malicious intent isn't a very interesting villain. buffalo all day posted:It feels like Serenity/Firefly - a gang of outcasts on a ship creating a surrogate family. Cozy and enjoyable.
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Nov 28, 2023 01:21
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Chairman Capone posted:Is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet good? For me it was like season one of Ted Lasso during high pandemic: something that was just nice and comforting. It’s fairly quiet and calm and cozy. If you’re in that kind of mood I’d recommend it. I kind of like A Psalm for the Wild Built and Prayer for the Crown-Shy better though. Also quiet, but I liked world building better.
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Nov 28, 2023 01:53
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Chairman Capone posted:Is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet good?
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Nov 28, 2023 02:10
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I just finished Shadow Games, one of the Black Company books. While I'm enjoying the series as a whole so far, I was a bit miffed at the ending here. It did a good job of capturing my interest with the new area and new bad guys and all, but it turned out every single one of them was just the Taken? That really annoyed me to be honest especially with how they all seem to keep coming back from the dead. Also I was buying into that big mystery that the author kept hinting at in regards to the company's origins, that didn't pay off at all. Does it in the new couple of books or does it get dropped?
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Nov 28, 2023 03:10
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mewse posted:Fog with malicious intent isn't a very interesting villain. I think it's deep in the 2nd half of the book when there is finally confrontation between the protags and the fog, and it shows one of the wizards having his powers stripped away while he closes the portal the fog came from. I haven't read this review, and probably won't until I finish the book, but I'm 40% of the way through it and I am struggling with the writing style. It feels like everything is happening at arms length and the plot is moving incredibly slowly. I've learned more of the story from skimming the glossary than anything else, and it just raises a ton of questions that the story doesn't seem intent on answering.
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Nov 28, 2023 04:31
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Drunk Driver Dad posted:Also I was buying into that big mystery that the author kept hinting at in regards to the company's origins, that didn't pay off at all. Does it in the new couple of books or does it get dropped?[/spoiler] That's still coming.
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Nov 28, 2023 04:38
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Curse of the Mistwraith and Janny Wurts chat: Wurts has a very strong, very dense prose style. If you're not jiving with it, it will not veer from that. I personally love it but any time I pick up a Wurts book after reading other stuff, it always takes me something like 50-100 pages to get back into the right frame of mind for reading it. It's also book 1 of 11 massive tomes so yeah, there are tons of questions that don't get answered yet. One of the key ones where have the missing Paravians gone? doesn't get answered until Book 10. And yeah, the antagonist is malicious fog and the focus is preserving the compact and Paravian survival because this is basically environmental fantasy. Random bit characters will have backstories that ordinarily other authors would spin out into epic trilogies in their own right. In The Wars of Light and Shadow, it's literally just backstory and you'll get time skips that are decades/generations between books. I love the epic scope of it to bits.
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Nov 28, 2023 06:56
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Curse of the Mistrwraith was my only did not finish of the year.
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Nov 28, 2023 07:00
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The Empire Trilogy does sound more welcoming.
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Nov 28, 2023 07:25
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I got the first book when it was on sale last week - it was pretty good. Was a bit of a risk because I also bounced off Mistwraith #1, but I'd read the Feist Magician books ages ago, figured that would get me started. Ultimately, I don't think they're super necessary to know anything about, it stands on its own pretty much. I also thought it was very Shogun-y, but if you (a) haven't read Shogun or (b) don't mind a lot of Shogun influence, it's fine. I liked it enough to get the second book, and I'm halfway through it and, boy in this one, the Shogun got, somehow, considerably turned up. At this rate the third one will be Maximum Shogun.
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Nov 28, 2023 07:38
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FPyat posted:The Empire Trilogy does sound more welcoming. That's the Feist influence, I'd put my money on that. There's a really interesting article where they talk about their collaboration process which boils down to getting together to hash out the outline and then splitting up the chapters to write. Then they swapped chapters and rewrote/revised them and did not look back at what got cut. And swapped them again and again and again until they both decided the book was done. Originally it was a duology of just Daughter and Servant until Feist called Wurts up and said, you know we gotta write a third book, and she's like, what, no, the story's done with Servant, and he pointed out there was the little matter of the Assembly and she was like drat, yeah, you're right, and that's how we got Mistress. I'd also put money on Wurts being the main reason The Empire Trilogy that holds up today. I've read a few Midkemia books and none of them were all that memorable but I re-read Empire every few years and it still makes me cry, every time. Lex Talionis posted:For me the problem is that the book's fundamental idea seemed to be: there's these two brothers and they are related by blood yet--ohmygosh--they are also rivals and maybe even opposites, they could almost be friends but they have a tragic destiny that will lead them into strife! And in an amazing twist, the shadow brother is the good guy and the light brother is a dick! Mind! Blown! And like, okay, that's cool I guess, but then I really need these two characters to work for me. And...they didn't. The dialogue in particular let the whole thing down a lot, I felt. Two thirds of the way through the book I think the light brother gets mind-corrupted or whatever but it's like, well he acted like a robot already so it doesn't feel very different. IMO Lysaer gets shafted. He's got a really compelling storyline of his own and I would loooooooooove to see it develop but unfortunately (general spoilers to the end of book 10) every time it seems like he's gonna get somewhere, the titular mistwraith curse flares up and steals his self-control and he doesn't have the mage training that Arithon does to deal with it so the plotline just continually stalls. That said, you know going in from book 1 that Arithon is the main protagonist so it's not really a surprise.
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Nov 28, 2023 07:45
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Ccs posted:These are cool but I like the roughs more than the finished illustrations, Logen looks far too young. Yeah I've always had a mental image of logen as gray haired even from the start, same for all the other characters he hung out with. I learned I got their ages wrong as the books went on, but they just all sounded old as balls to me. 40-50s easily in the first book I thought. Also uglier, way uglier.
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Nov 28, 2023 09:27
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fermun posted:Curse of the Mistrwraith was my only did not finish of the year.
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Nov 28, 2023 14:17
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Leng posted:IMO Lysaer gets shafted. He's got a really compelling storyline of his own and I would loooooooooove to see it develop but unfortunately (general spoilers to the end of book 10) every time it seems like he's gonna get somewhere, the titular mistwraith curse flares up and steals his self-control and he doesn't have the mage training that Arithon does to deal with it so the plotline just continually stalls. That said, you know going in from book 1 that Arithon is the main protagonist so it's not really a surprise. This has been my issue with the series as well, although I am only on book 5. There is some character development for him early on but he ends up really 1 note and not very interesting. I think it would have been more interesting to see how the mistwraith is slowly corrupting his thoughts and making him more focused on revenge. There is a lot of plotting and the story drags because of it, in book 5 there are 2 big chapters that describe a spell being cast, and then someone discovering the spell being cast and both felt very tedious. I will say if you stick to it, the starting slog pays off in Fugitive Prince.
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Nov 28, 2023 16:09
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Leng posted:That's the Feist influence, I'd put my money on that. There's a really interesting article where they talk about their collaboration process which boils down to getting together to hash out the outline and then splitting up the chapters to write. Then they swapped chapters and rewrote/revised them and did not look back at what got cut. And swapped them again and again and again until they both decided the book was done. Originally it was a duology of just Daughter and Servant until Feist called Wurts up and said, you know we gotta write a third book, and she's like, what, no, the story's done with Servant, and he pointed out there was the little matter of the Assembly and she was like drat, yeah, you're right, and that's how we got Mistress. That's interesting and also doesn't surprise me at all; I remember when I read it I felt like Servant contained two books worth of climax and denoument and wrapped up the story started in Daughter quite nicely, and then it would have made more sense to split Servant into two books and then publish Mistress as a sort of coda, Chanur's Legacy style.
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Nov 28, 2023 16:48
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Leng posted:IMO Lysaer gets shafted. He's got a really compelling storyline of his own and I would loooooooooove to see it develop but unfortunately (general spoilers to the end of book 10) every time it seems like he's gonna get somewhere, the titular mistwraith curse flares up and steals his self-control and he doesn't have the mage training that Arithon does to deal with it so the plotline just continually stalls. That said, you know going in from book 1 that Arithon is the main protagonist so it's not really a surprise. I liked Lysaer better of the two; Arithon was just so ridiculously saintly it was hard for me to care about him. But yeah, it was obvious from the start that Lysaer was getting set up for a disaster, and even before that it got tedious having him constantly be the guy who needed things explained.
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Nov 28, 2023 17:06
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Chairman Capone posted:Is The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet good? I used to think that too, but looking at his entire bibliography American Gods and Anansi Boys are the only real outliers. I think the guy is just happy writing YA and children's books.
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Nov 28, 2023 17:36
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American Gods is the only thing of his that I really, really liked, I think I've read that book like 3 times.
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Nov 28, 2023 18:48
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:Finished Mona Lisa Overdrive today and thus the entire Sprawl trilogy. It's been about a year since I last read the Sprawl trilogy, and I never thought too hard about Continuity or its motivations, but I can offer some guesses: Continuity is essentially the same as the Loas, and thus it is an inscrutable AI with inscrutable motivations. Continuity is not just like the Loas, it's in league with them, and wants Angie to join with Bobby in the Aleph, thus it works to both protect her and further 3Jane's plot as far as that will get Angie into the Aleph. Continuity cares most about Sense/Net and its success, so it protects Angie until it has a suitable replacement for her in Mona.
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Nov 28, 2023 19:16
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I loved Starfall a lot. I thought it was funny and sad.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:16
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SimonChris posted:And may I just add that I hated, hated, hated the twist with Ganelon. Way to ruin the best character in the books in a way that makes no sense whatsoever. I do not for a second believe that Zelazny had planned this in advance. He didn't plan anything in amber in advance. Those books were quite literally written to pay the bills.
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Nov 28, 2023 22:09
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PeterWeller posted:It's been about a year since I last read the Sprawl trilogy, and I never thought too hard about Continuity or its motivations, but I can offer some guesses: If Continuity had only tried to erase Angie's vévés, you could assume it was doing it to protect Angie and/or The Brand™. If Continuity had only let Lanier be compromised, you could assume it was trying to get Angie into the aleph. Having both be true seems mutually contradictory. Like yeah, if the point is supposed to be 'AI motivations are unknowable and probably incomprehensible', then that's fine but it could have been more explicit. Plus it's inevitably a bit unsatisfying narratively, even if it is true.
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Nov 28, 2023 22:23
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