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I read a fantasy novel as a kid. It was set in a sort of post-apocalyptic medieval world. The protagonist name escapes me, but he was an "overman", I think, rode some sort of giant cat and came to small town at the beginning, scaring the poo poo out of everyone. He was chasing after a wizard, found his palace and attempted to carve the door open with his axe. The wizard was black. That's all I can really remember aside from one portion of the book mentioning his mount didn't like hearing it's own footsteps in the sand. I'm not certain if this exists.
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Oct 26, 2010 06:21
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dimwitf posted:On a related note: Usenet. rec.arts.sf.written is probably the best shot at identifying a science fiction book or story - even though I've not been there in years, the community looks almost as active as ever. The local convention is to use the term "YASID" ("Yet Another Story ID") in the subject, and at one time someone was actively keeping stats on the percentage of successful identifications and the time taken to achieve them. Actually, it appears they still do: http://groups.google.com.au/group/rec.arts.sf.written/browse_thread/thread/4c45fedc30033353/233dc3e7556de4d8?hl=en&q=
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Oct 26, 2010 09:06
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:Here's one I heard referenced by Ishmael Reed once but absolutely cannot remember the title or authour of. Sorry, it's Erasure by Percival Everett Arturo Ui fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Oct 27, 2010 |
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Oct 27, 2010 01:16
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dimwitf posted:- An spaceship/time machine is sent back to prevent The Asteroid from wiping out dinosaurs. The people inside then hop forward many years at a time, watching the dinos develop culture and tech, and hit a "go home" button before they might be detected by telescopes on the ground. Mission's a success, big party to celebrate all they've learned - and it's interrupted by "aliens". They explain that they're actually the descendants of the dinosaurs, and with their 65-million-year head start on us, they'd developed time travel long ago. At one point, they decided to sent a spaceship/time machine back to see what would happen if An Asteroid wiped out their ancestors... Dinosaur Nexus?
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Oct 27, 2010 07:18
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Elohssa Gib posted:Dinosaur Nexus? Nah, this was a short story, it doesn't go into anything after the initial meeting (which is peaceful).
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Oct 30, 2010 01:01
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This is a Japanese horror novel that involves a woman being kidnapped and having all of her senses being wrecked so that the only thing she could experience is pain. Someone was selling it in SA Mart a long time ago but I can't remember the name of it.
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Oct 31, 2010 00:15
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I'm trying to remember a series of books from my childhood, in the hopes of maybe checking them out to revisit my youth. Unfortunately, I remember very little. I (probably) read them about 5th/6th grade, so they should be around that reading level. They were all kind of spooky, involving things like voodoo dolls and the occult and mysterious plots. I'm not sure if it was always the same characters, but I think there was a boy who gets wrapped up in said spooky stuff and has an uncle (possibly named Benedict) who dabbles in the occult and helps him out. If I remember right, the covers of the editions I read all had rough black and white sketches of the people/scenes involved. I'm wracking my brains for other details, but coming up blank.
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Nov 2, 2010 06:02
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ianvincible posted:I'm trying to remember a series of books from my childhood, in the hopes of maybe checking them out to revisit my youth. Unfortunately, I remember very little. Maybe the Lewis Barnavelt books by John Bellairs? I suggested it a few posts back for somebody else, but darn if yours doesn't sound like it too.
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Nov 2, 2010 10:26
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ianvincible posted:I'm trying to remember a series of books from my childhood, in the hopes of maybe checking them out to revisit my youth. Unfortunately, I remember very little. "The Drum, the Doll, and the Zombie" which was one of the johnny Dixon novels created by Bellairs but written by Brad Strickland after Bellairs death. The covers were done by the very distinguishable Edward Gorey. copies of all the covers can be found here On a side note i grew up reading all of Bellairs stuff as a kid and it is all wonderful and fun to go back and reread as an adult.
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Nov 2, 2010 15:30
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Short story I'm trying to remember. Only things that I can recall is that it was about two lesbians in a relationship, one of whom was completely non-musical - unable to comprehend music - and the other one of who was a concert musician of some sort. I read it several years ago, but I think it's fairly contemporary - published within the last twenty or so years. That's all I got. Hope someone recognizes it.
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Nov 2, 2010 20:52
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Ive got some very fragmented memories of a book I read about a decade ago, that I'm trying to track down and get a copy of. Its an old book published by Corgi (published sometime in the 1960s/70s, I think?), in their old style black cover, with a nazi swastika flag and coalscuttle helmet on the front. Its a story that swaps between a bunch of viewpoints of protagonists, during the german invasion/russian counterattack circa 1942; and is generally a very gritty and cynical depiction of the conflict. Only a couple of scenes stick out in my mind, one of a german platoon weathering an artillery/tank attack cowering in foxholes, and later, a german general visiting a field hospital and being lost for words when (if I recall correctly) he gives a decoration for bravery to a guy whos just had his legs amputated. Plasmafountain fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Nov 3, 2010 |
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Nov 3, 2010 00:03
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It wasn't by Sven Hassel was it?
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Nov 3, 2010 04:41
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wheatpuppy posted:Maybe the Lewis Barnavelt books by John Bellairs? I suggested it a few posts back for somebody else, but darn if yours doesn't sound like it too. RandomEffects posted:If The above post does not seem right you might have read Looking at the covers, I recognize some by Bellairs and some by Strickland, so it looks like you were both right. Thanks! Now time to try and track down some copies.
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Nov 3, 2010 04:59
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ianvincible posted:Looking at the covers, I recognize some by Bellairs and some by Strickland, so it looks like you were both right. Thanks! Now time to try and track down some copies.
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Nov 3, 2010 09:27
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There's a book I read the first chapter of a long time ago, loved, and then totally lost the title of. I remember the jacket had some hubbub about how young and talented the author was, and the first chapter involved him as a kid waiting at the airport with his mom with some toys, for his dad, and his dad having a girlfriend. There was a good line near the end of the chapter about parents calling each other by their first names giving kids a tiny glimpse of a whole world they don't know. Any ideas? I know it's a stretch.
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Nov 4, 2010 13:09
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I have two that might actually be poo poo to read now, I recall reading them when I was like 13/14, but they've been niggling away every so often for a while now: 1) All I remember is that it was that the two main characters were twins, a boy and a girl. They lived in a city that is divided in to numbered classes and I'm fairly sure one, if not them both, was kicked out of the city or has to escape. Towards the end there's a big scene in the desert aboard what I THINK is some kind of tank fort or moving headquarters. I think it was the first book in a trilogy. 2) I remember less of this one, but it concerned some kind of time travellers who could go to any point in time on holiday, but couldn't change anything. I think there were time police who policed cases where people alter time. I have a few vague ideas, but I couldn't say for sure they were from the book. I guess they're probably geared towards younger readers (but I don't recall them being particularly child orientated) but could equally have been for adults.
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Nov 14, 2010 23:54
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fightwithcrayons posted:1) All I remember is that it was that the two main characters were twins, a boy and a girl. They lived in a city that is divided in to numbered classes and I'm fairly sure one, if not them both, was kicked out of the city or has to escape. Towards the end there's a big scene in the desert aboard what I THINK is some kind of tank fort or moving headquarters. I think it was the first book in a trilogy. Doesn't match your description entirely, but Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve is about gigantic, tiered cities on tank treads rolling around a massive post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be Eurasia. It has a boy and girl (who aren't twins) who have to escape the city. It's the first of a tetralogy. (I've read the first, it's quite good and the sequels are meant to be even better)
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Nov 15, 2010 01:18
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I've been trying to remember the title of the young adult romance novel I read in middle school (nostalgia!). It was written probably in the 70s and the plot went something like this: A girl is sent to Italy(?) to live with her relatives. She meets two twin brothers there one of whom is in a wheelchair. There is a masked, peasant-avenging, horseback riding, sword fighting, champion roaming the countryside (he may have gone by the name "the hawk"). Surprisingly (hurr hurr) it turns out the wheelchair-bound brother is our mysterious hero. Love ensues. It just bugs me because I loved the book and have no recollection of the title or author or anything. Googling it hasn't been effective for me either. I know it's a long shot, but I'd love to find it again.
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Nov 15, 2010 09:16
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fightwithcrayons posted:2) I remember less of this one, but it concerned some kind of time travellers who could go to any point in time on holiday, but couldn't change anything. I think there were time police who policed cases where people alter time. I have a few vague ideas, but I couldn't say for sure they were from the book. Are you sure this was a full length book? Because it sounds to me it could be one Ray Bradbury's short stories, either "Sound of Thunder" or "The Fox and the Forest". Both involve time travel in a similar way to what you described.
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Nov 15, 2010 09:45
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Hedrigall posted:Doesn't match your description entirely, but Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve is about gigantic, tiered cities on tank treads rolling around a massive post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be Eurasia. It has a boy and girl (who aren't twins) who have to escape the city. It's the first of a tetralogy. (I've read the first, it's quite good and the sequels are meant to be even better) Looked it up, doesn't seem to be (although I nearly bought that the other day! Might buy that after reading a bit more of it). They were definitely twins, and the city itself didn't move. I think they were psychic or some poo poo?
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Nov 15, 2010 12:42
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I'm looking for a story that I read as a kid about a boy who lived in a town at the edge of a (forest? desert? mountain range?). Every year at the same time on the same day, there was an explosion heard in the distance. No one could or would investigate, so the boy or maybe a group of boys set off to locate the source. They eventually found a crashed plane, whose broken window focused sunlight into a cave of saltpetre once a year.
Bolkovr fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Nov 15, 2010 |
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Nov 15, 2010 23:42
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Telemaze posted:I'm looking for a short story I found in an anthology a few years ago. In it, a person meets a stranger on a park bench, and the stranger begins telling the person how he is a refugee who was exiled from his homeland, which he can never return to because it is being run by a tyrant. The tyrant is insane and cruel but since he controls all the propaganda that gets out, he has misled everyone badly. It turns out that the exiled stranger is actually Lucifer. Wow, this is waaaaay back in the thread and you've probably already found this story/don't care any more, but this is a short story called "Easter Sunday" by Gene Wolfe. And i'm gonna go ahead and repost mine in the vain hopes someone will recognize it/will have read it in middle/high school too: I read a short story in school that i'm pretty sure was part of a chapter in my lit book about stuff inspired by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In the story, a woman is wandering around a destroyed town, unable to remember anything about the town or who she is. She's desperately looking for a mirror, a puddle, anything that can show her her face - because she thinks that if she sees her face she'll remember who she is. The whole story has a really creepy, dream-like atmosphere. At the end of the story she finds a house that's not entirely destroyed and finds a mirror inside, and when she sees her face she remembers everything, and it ends something like "and who she was, and the name of this town, and why she would never be able to leave it." or something close to that. Any help?
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Nov 16, 2010 23:52
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Short story about a young boy on vacation, I want to say in Mexico, but maybe somewhere in the Caribbean. He keeps going to this beach and swimming, because he wants to be able to dive down and swim through a hole in a big chunk of rock that's too deep for him at the beginning of the story. I seem to recall him being jealous of the local boys because they can all do it easily, and also that he keeps pushing himself harder and harder to be able to dive deeper and longer and he gets a nasty nosebleed from exerting himself down there.
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Nov 18, 2010 10:03
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Detective Thompson posted:Short story about a young boy on vacation, I want to say in Mexico, but maybe somewhere in the Caribbean. He keeps going to this beach and swimming, because he wants to be able to dive down and swim through a hole in a big chunk of rock that's too deep for him at the beginning of the story. I seem to recall him being jealous of the local boys because they can all do it easily, and also that he keeps pushing himself harder and harder to be able to dive deeper and longer and he gets a nasty nosebleed from exerting himself down there. Holy cow, I remember that story! drat, now I want to know what it's called, too. Because of that story, I used to go looking for underwater holes to swim into as a kid growing up in Florida. I found a couple, mostly in rock tide-breaks. It's a miracle I didn't drown.
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Nov 19, 2010 15:46
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I'm looking for the author or titles of a series of historical novels based on women in the Old Testament. They would have been published in the late '50s or '60s. One of the books had a yellow dust jacket and was about Ruth, one was red and about Esther, and one was green(?) and about Michal (David's wife).
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Nov 20, 2010 05:51
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A YA novel about a teenager put in a radical drug addiction treatment program, despite not being addicted to drugs. Her brother was also in the program at one point and she spends much of the novel addressing him directly; at the end it's revealed that he died by diving into an empty swimming pool, no one being sure if it was suicide or not. I remember the program was militaristic and the protagonist was paired up with an older member and had to sleep at her house and be led around by her beltloops. They had group meetings and had something called "motivating" where they had to be as enthusiastic as possible about answering questions, waving their arms in the air. Bizarre novel, been bugging me for a bit. Thanks! fightwithcrayons posted:1) All I remember is that it was that the two main characters were twins, a boy and a girl. They lived in a city that is divided in to numbered classes and I'm fairly sure one, if not them both, was kicked out of the city or has to escape. Towards the end there's a big scene in the desert aboard what I THINK is some kind of tank fort or moving headquarters. I think it was the first book in a trilogy. That's the first in the Wind on Fire trilogy by William Nicholson, called The Wind Singer. The second book is Slaves of the Mastery, and the third is Firesong. The twins are Kestrel and Bowman, the city is Aramanth and the tank fort was a giant desert boat  Good books, I still read them sometimes.
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Nov 21, 2010 20:52
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Here's one that's probably pretty difficult, and I'm not sure if it's within the scope of the thread, but here goes nothing. When I was a youngster in the late eighties/early nineties, I had a pair of brain teaser/puzzle books. They were both formatted the same way: each puzzle was part of a rather complex two-page colored line-art illustration, with a sidebar containing the number of the puzzle (in a style consistent with the theme of the illustration; for example, a drawing depicting a garden would have the number formed by a bouquet of flowers), a short story describing the problem to be solved. The answers in the back were presented as part of additional, extra-challenging puzzle-stories that, if I recall correctly, didn't have answers. Additionally, every puzzle picture had a small, hard-to-spot spider in it, sitting on a letter; combining the letters found in all the pictures would yield a phrase or direction or something to that effect. There's only one puzzle I really remember in any detail. A boy had to pick a rare medicinal flower on a mountainside, and the puzzle entailed determining which of the myriad flowers on the page was the correct one. The "challenge" puzzle was that a snail in the picture had spotted the (apparently delicious) medicinal flower and wanted to eat it, but getting to the flower required navigating across rocks heavily covered with poisonous lichen -- a fairly complicated maze. The books were paperback, about 8.5" x 11", and relatively short, not more than 15 or so puzzle-pictures (about 40pp, some answers in the back). I haven't been able to find them, but not for lack of trying. It's just that all this information is disparate, and fairly worthless to a search engine, you know? This has seriously been weighing on my mind for the past week or so, apropos of nothing, but any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
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Nov 23, 2010 22:11
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A HUNGRY MOUTH posted:Here's one that's probably pretty difficult, and I'm not sure if it's within the scope of the thread, but here goes nothing. I'm not really sure that this is what you're talking about, but what you described sounded a lot like a puzzle book that I had when I was younger so I went looking for it. I google image searched "children's puzzle books" went through several pages of images and then found one that looked like the same artist, so I did an Amazon search of the artist "Paul Adshead" and lo and behold I found what I was looking for. Mine was called "Puzzle Island" and I still haven't figured out all of the puzzles in that book. I might look for it when I go home for Thanksgiving. Here's the Link: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&tag=mozilla-20&index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=paul%20adshead&sourceid=Mozilla-search It's a long shot, but I hope it helps.
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Nov 24, 2010 03:12
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innocent_deadly posted:I'm not really sure that this is what you're talking about, but what you described sounded a lot like a puzzle book that I had when I was younger so I went looking for it. I google image searched "children's puzzle books" went through several pages of images and then found one that looked like the same artist, so I did an Amazon search of the artist "Paul Adshead" and lo and behold I found what I was looking for. Mine was called "Puzzle Island" and I still haven't figured out all of the puzzles in that book. I might look for it when I go home for Thanksgiving. Here's the Link: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&tag=mozilla-20&index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=paul%20adshead&sourceid=Mozilla-search This isn't it, but I can (and do) fully appreciate the effort. Thanks anyway for expending time on my goofy request. edit: after a few more minutes of strained recollection, I remember that at least one of the books had the consistent theme of colors-and-shapes-as-difficulty in the drawings: the circle-(or yellow-)themed puzzles would be the easiest to solve, the rectangle-(or blue-)themed puzzles moderately difficult, the red triangles the most difficult to solve. I'm pretty sure there was another maze, set up like an enormous cupboard with numerous cubbyholes of differing sizes and shapes. Holes of the aforementioned shapes (circle, etc.) were punched in the internal separators, and the idea was that you had to navigate from one end to another using only the holes of a given difficulty. An additional constraint was that the cubbyholes had items and letters and whatnot in them, and certain difficulties had to avoid certain items/letters. If you'll permit me to say so, that maze owned. I really wish I could find these books! e2: here's a sketch of that mess I described above. Please excuse the crudity of this model; I didn't have time to draw it to scale or to color it. Also, I think I'm done unhealthily obsessing over a childhood book for tonight. 
A HUNGRY MOUTH fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Nov 24, 2010 |
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Nov 24, 2010 03:31
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Okay, that was a lie; I wasn't finished obsessing, but I somehow found them: they were Amazing Mazes and a couple of the For Eagle Eyes books by Rolf Heimann. I'm dead serious when I say I'm going to order them right now, because it's not often I get this much catharsis. innocent_deadly, thanks for your help! A HUNGRY MOUTH fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Nov 24, 2010 |
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Nov 24, 2010 04:38
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okay, perhaps somebody can help as this has been giving me trouble for awhile. they are kids books, and there are more than one by the same person. I read these as a kid in the mid/late 1980s so they're not terribly current. All i know is that i checked this books out religiously and that they featured the main character who was simply drawn and always had a mustache. he had a little round head, and I think he was always drawn shorter than the other people in the story. depicted as a kid, he had a mustache, as well as an adult. with a kid on the way... i now have a reason to build a children's library and i'd like to add these books. i wish i had more to give you, but that's all i have.
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Nov 24, 2010 04:58
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A HUNGRY MOUTH posted:Okay, that was a lie; I wasn't finished obsessing, but I somehow found them: they were Amazing Mazes and a couple of the For Eagle Eyes books by Rolf Heimann. I'm dead serious when I say I'm going to order them right now, because it's not often I get this much catharsis. Oh my god I loved these books to death as a kid. Must look them up...
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Nov 24, 2010 11:23
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Detective Thompson posted:Short story about a young boy on vacation, I want to say in Mexico, but maybe somewhere in the Caribbean. He keeps going to this beach and swimming, because he wants to be able to dive down and swim through a hole in a big chunk of rock that's too deep for him at the beginning of the story. I seem to recall him being jealous of the local boys because they can all do it easily, and also that he keeps pushing himself harder and harder to be able to dive deeper and longer and he gets a nasty nosebleed from exerting himself down there. "Through the Tunnel" by Doris Lessing. I remember it too, because stories about people being in tunnels underwater always give me the wiggins.
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Nov 27, 2010 01:05
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PonchtheJedi posted:"Through the Tunnel" by Doris Lessing. Here's another rite of passage/overcoming limitations type story I read way back when that I would like to find, again: The story (a shortish novel?) was about a high school (I think) track and field athlete who wanted to pole vault, but kept being held back by his (her?) own fears. At the top of the vault, he would always freak out and end up clinging to the pole instead of pushing it away. I don't remember if he always had this problem, or if it started after an accident (I seem to remember an injured ankle in there, somewhere), but the main conflict in the story was about this kid overcoming his fear and finally pushing away the pole to make a successful vault. Edit: rite != right Centripetal Horse fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Nov 28, 2010 |
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Nov 27, 2010 06:34
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I read a short story a while back about a boy who works at an opera house and tries to spend as much time in an art gallery as possible to surround himself with luxury while essentially ignoring the art itself. He eventually steals money from somewhere and runs off to a big city, where he puts himself up in a luxurious hotel and lives the life of the idle rich, before running out of money and killing himself. It ends by comparing his death to the crushing of a camera. Can anyone help me out?
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Nov 28, 2010 03:06
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The Easy Rider posted:I read a short story a while back about a boy who works at an opera house and tries to spend as much time in an art gallery as possible to surround himself with luxury while essentially ignoring the art itself. He eventually steals money from somewhere and runs off to a big city, where he puts himself up in a luxurious hotel and lives the life of the idle rich, before running out of money and killing himself. It ends by comparing his death to the crushing of a camera. Can anyone help me out? Paul's Case.
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Nov 28, 2010 12:00
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Phantom LOLbooth posted:Paul's Case. That's the one! Thanks for the help!
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Nov 28, 2010 21:16
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I read a book about 10 years ago, but it was a yellowed paperback at that point. It was about a girl with multiple personalities, I believe it was based on a true story. The first two pages were the names and a description of each of her personalities, there were like 20. Don't know the name or author. Help!
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Nov 30, 2010 01:58
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JustinMorgan posted:I read a book about 10 years ago, but it was a yellowed paperback at that point. It was about a girl with multiple personalities, I believe it was based on a true story. The first two pages were the names and a description of each of her personalities, there were like 20. Don't know the name or author. Help! That's definitely Sybil.
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Nov 30, 2010 02:51
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I'm looking for the names of two stories, unrelated to each other. Story 1: "The Diamond in the Window" by Jane Langton. Thank you, wheatpuppy and Ballsworthy. - kids/tweens/teens (siblings?) travel into the chambers of a nautilus seashell. - They could move inwards easily, but on the way back out, they were obstructed by riddles/puzzles in each chamber. They needed to solve them and exit the shell quickly, on pain of permanent entrapment/death. Story 2: Children's book, "The Tub People" by Pam Conrad, thanks to innocent_deadly for finding it! - A family of toy figurines gets sucked down the bathtub drain and spend the story trying to reunite. - They're like wooden dolls that have similar proportions to clothespins. - The "dad" wears a suit and bowler hat. - "The Tubmans", or "Farewell Tubmen" comes to mind, but Google doesn't agree. - bright colors and stylization that would probably be at home in Seurat's "La Grande Jatte," although maybe without the pointilism. mamelon fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Dec 1, 2010 |
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Nov 30, 2010 02:58
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