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hooah posted:I recently remembered reading a book about a bunch of kids at some sort of telepathy/telekinesis school when I was young. I don't think the school was particularly malicious, but I think the kids wanted to leave anyway? Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about? Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody? It's set in a kind of post-apocalyptic world where a bunch of teenagers have ESP and similar powers, and they're kept in this mountain facility/school where their powers are honed because the evil adults want to use the kids to find long-buried nuclear weapons or something (the weapons have AI, and the powers of the teenagers actually allow them to "hear" the AIs from a long way off). They try to escape from the school. Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Feb 8, 2015 |
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Feb 8, 2015 11:14
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Trying to think of a childrens book I had in the early 80s. It featured various cartoon animals doing different jobs. 90% sure it had elephants as contruction/steelworkers, and a lion as a pilot. I'm also fairly certain it was not a Richard Scarry book as the artwork was simpler, more solid colors. Please help if you remember this book. Thanks
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Feb 10, 2015 01:07
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I read the following summary about a horror short story here, somewhere in the forums. It never got identified. Anybody knows what this story might be called? "Basically, a group of 4-5 young adults are driving home from somewhere, and decide to take an unfamiliar shortcut. They end up in little maze of idyllic surburbia, row after row of neat little houses. There's absolutely nothing evil-looking or frightening about these houses in any way, however, apart from the fact that they are all identical, they are all apparently empty/deserted, and no matter how far the group drives or which direction they go, the houses never end. I always thought the ending to the story was a bit of a cop-out though, and goes against the gentle horror of the main scenario. At the end, two of the group are looking for the others who have been disappearing one by one. They eventually find them in one of the houses, except that, and I think I quote directly, if memory serves: "...something had quite neatly bitten off their heads.""
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Feb 11, 2015 11:01
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Two kids break into this local creepy fat guys house and find out that he's actually some horrible monster disguised as a fat guy who eats people (I think by lifting up his gut and forcing them in his belly) and replaces them with lifelike wooden dolls or something. It was a kids book or a short story in a collection.
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Feb 11, 2015 14:19
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Rough Lobster posted:Two kids break into this local creepy fat guys house and find out that he's actually some horrible monster disguised as a fat guy who eats people (I think by lifting up his gut and forcing them in his belly) and replaces them with lifelike wooden dolls or something. It was a kids book or a short story in a collection. I think this is The Fat Man by Joe Lansdale in Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares. That one stuck with me too -- I think his belly is a mouth that shreds the kid's face off so he can put it on the doll.
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Feb 11, 2015 14:30
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Rough Lobster posted:Two kids break into this local creepy fat guys house and find out that he's actually some horrible monster disguised as a fat guy who eats people (I think by lifting up his gut and forcing them in his belly) and replaces them with lifelike wooden dolls or something. It was a kids book or a short story in a collection. It's one of Bruce Coville's horror collections, but I'm not sure which one. I think it's Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares. E:f,b
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Feb 11, 2015 14:34
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Kid is an elf and goes to elf school, it's basically a normal school. One day he goes to the boiler room for some reason, meets the janitor who's a troll. He starts hanging out with the troll more, specifically they say that they don't sleep at all but that's ok because elves & trolls only sleep because there's nothing else to do. At the end it turns out that elves can turn into trolls if they eat other elves, and the kid seems to be turning into one.
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Feb 11, 2015 14:55
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computer parts posted:Kid is an elf and goes to elf school, it's basically a normal school. One day he goes to the boiler room for some reason, meets the janitor who's a troll. He starts hanging out with the troll more, specifically they say that they don't sleep at all but that's ok because elves & trolls only sleep because there's nothing else to do. Also from a Coville collection. Timor and the Furnace Troll from the Book of Monsters, written by John Barnes.
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Feb 11, 2015 15:01
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computer parts posted:Kid is an elf and goes to elf school, it's basically a normal school. One day he goes to the boiler room for some reason, meets the janitor who's a troll. He starts hanging out with the troll more, specifically they say that they don't sleep at all but that's ok because elves & trolls only sleep because there's nothing else to do. Wow. I didn't even remember that I'd forgotten this story. That brought back a lot of sudden memories. That story collection was awesome when I was younger.
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Feb 11, 2015 16:56
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Hi, I've been trying to remember a book for the longest time. The most I can remember is that it involved a girl who was running away from a foster home, I believe to find someone I forget if it was her mother or her aunt. The only other detail I can remember is that one of the characters was a little boy with aspergers syndrome.
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Feb 14, 2015 17:16
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cartoons123 posted:Hi, I've been trying to remember a book for the longest time. The most I can remember is that it involved a girl who was running away from a foster home, I believe to find someone I forget if it was her mother or her aunt. The only other detail I can remember is that one of the characters was a little boy with aspergers syndrome. This almost sounds like Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming.
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Feb 14, 2015 23:35
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I'm looking for a book I think I read in middle school or high school. It's about somebody trapped with a bunch of other people in some kind of geographic zone, it might have been an island. If they try to leave they're killed by sentry turrets or something. Then he gets out of the designated area somehow and finds the people who were supposedly killed are just in the hospital because their deaths were faked.
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Feb 21, 2015 23:33
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I'm searching for a book I loved as a kid so I can pass it on to my step children. It's an Australian history book, illustrated, and starts with stories about the dreamtime, covers the gold rush, Ned Kelly gang, Woollawarre Bennelong, the stump jump plough, I think there was a section on some famous tennis players? Towards the end there's stuff on Parliament House as well. Full page illustrations with text over them. I was born in 1990 so the book must have come out 1985 to 1995, and we had a hard cover copy of it. Hoping a fellow Ausgoon sees this and recognises it!
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Feb 22, 2015 11:22
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I remember hearing about a book about things which made people go insane when they saw them, and the protagonist was a woman who had managed to avoid them. Does anyone know the name of this? I couldn't think of a phrase that turned anything up in Google.
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Mar 4, 2015 07:51
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Hadaka Apron posted:I remember hearing about a book about things which made people go insane when they saw them, and the protagonist was a woman who had managed to avoid them. Does anyone know the name of this? I couldn't think of a phrase that turned anything up in Google. Is it Bird Box? I haven't read it, but I heard (vagueish spoilers) you never find out what the thing is making people insane, or any answers at all really. Apparently it's quite a disappointing book. And here's a hilarious excerpt from a review on Goodreads, which is probably a spoiler but I really have no loving clue: "The ending raised so many questions, but not in the way I thought it would, or in any good way at all. Can a grown woman really dangle from a window by an umbilical cord?" What the gently caress, lol. Hedrigall fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Mar 4, 2015 08:15
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That's it, thanks.
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Mar 4, 2015 13:53
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Hedrigall posted:And here's a hilarious excerpt from a review on Goodreads, which is probably a spoiler but I really have no loving clue: "The ending raised so many questions, but not in the way I thought it would, or in any good way at all. Can a grown woman really dangle from a window by an umbilical cord?" What the gently caress, lol.
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Mar 4, 2015 17:11
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Maybe an incredibly hosed up take on that scene from Machete?
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Mar 4, 2015 22:31
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A trilogy of science fiction books from the late 80's. Author name Wren or Robin or seagull, something that makes me think of birds. One of the main characters took the name Lamb. The society was quasi feudal with a few rich aristocrats who controlled the military ruling over planets full of illiterate serfs. When I read them again in my 29's I realised they were pretty much romances, but my teenage self enjoyed them...
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Mar 9, 2015 07:58
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yaffle posted:A trilogy of science fiction books from the late 80's. Author name Wren or Robin or seagull, something that makes me think of birds. One of the main characters took the name Lamb. The society was quasi feudal with a few rich aristocrats who controlled the military ruling over planets full of illiterate serfs. When I read them again in my 29's I realised they were pretty much romances, but my teenage self enjoyed them... Sword of the Lamb by MK Wren? Trilogy is the Phoenix Legacy.
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Mar 9, 2015 12:27
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foxatee posted:Sword of the Lamb by MK Wren? Trilogy is the Phoenix Legacy. well poo poo, my Google fu is very weak indeed, that is the one, thanks.
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Mar 9, 2015 16:11
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Sci-fi short story I read 20-25 years ago. Basically, there is a tv channel dedicated to "real lives". At any point your family could, unannounced, be burst in on by a tv crew who would film you for a day as a pilot of sorts, if your life was interesting and got a lot of viewers you could then be picked up as a regular series. Story followed one such family who was all too typically boring and they just watched tv themselves while being filmed for their pilot. I think the story's pov was from that family's mother who knew they were probably too boring to be picked up but hoped that somehow they would be anyway.
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Mar 10, 2015 02:15
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regulargonzalez posted:Sci-fi short story I read 20-25 years ago. Basically, there is a tv channel dedicated to "real lives". At any point your family could, unannounced, be burst in on by a tv crew who would film you for a day as a pilot of sorts, if your life was interesting and got a lot of viewers you could then be picked up as a regular series. I think I read this too. I can't remember the name but it seems likely it was in an anthology called "TV:2000" edited by the usual trio of Greenberg/Asimov/Waugh.
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Mar 10, 2015 02:40
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I posted about this six years ago and I'm still on the hunt. I'm beginning to think that maybe this book was never actually published and that my 8th grade English class had access to advance versions of it for some reason. Humanity destroys itself and aliens protect the remaining humans in domes scattered around the world from the atomic fallout. Some domes have more resources than others and goods are transported through a hive network (possibly floating in the sky for all to see - also possibly the title of the book). I remember one character in the book that might not have had arms or legs and one of the main exports of her dome/bubble/colony were pictures that she drew with her mouth--very tiny pictures, possibly stamp sized. The aliens provide helpful hints and messages like "discard the apples that you harvested from the tree because they are radioactive". When the humans disobey they have a way of making all the humans fall asleep (fog maybe) so that they can protect the silly humans from killing themselves off. I vaguely remember the main character and a male love interest going into The Hive and fighting aliens, having sex, and getting pregnant. The aliens may or may not have wanted to kill her unborn child.
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Mar 11, 2015 21:47
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Chamale posted:You're probably thinking of The Smyth Report. It was supposed to be titled Atomic Bombs, but for security reasons, most of the copies were distributed with the title A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Nuclear Energy for Military Purposes Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945, so people called it The Smyth Report after its author. Old post, but I think that could be it. The name Smyth sounds familiar, the table of contents seems familiar, and the introduction has that feeling of something that I read once quite a while ago. The Wikipedia article also says 8000 copies were sold to employees at Oak Ridge, and my grandfather worked there as 4F service, so that could definitely be it.
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Mar 14, 2015 16:43
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In the early 1990s there was a 'Where's Waldo' type book where Waldo was replaced by a family who had an awful lot in common with Al Bundy's family on Married with children. Does anyone know what the name was? Hey, it's a book; it has a spine and pages.
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Mar 19, 2015 00:57
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And one more in case the above request doesn't count as a true book/story. There were a couple of scary legend/stories that I read in a book with assorted stories in it. Within the past 15 years. One of the stories was fairly common and I read at least one or two other versions of it in other books. The other story I had never read before. Story one: Native American and his wife are out traveling and decide to stop for the night. There is like a two story lodge thing they go into. Something about a dead body in the upstairs part. The woman wants no part of that, so she sleeps downstairs while the dude decides to sleep upstairs (I think it had a bed, otherwise I have no idea why). Sure enough she wakes up to inhuman screaming and cautiously calls out to her husband. She sees something moving on the stairs and bolts out the door to get away from it. It was like some kind of skinwalker. At this point the story varied depending on which book it was in. The one I remember best involved her running through the forest while this thing chased after her. She ran and ran, until she stumbled on a hunting party, and they killed it. End of story. Story two: Seemed to be a period piece set a few hundred years ago. Widowed woman lives in a large house, I think she had kids. There is a large portrait of her dead husband with his sword hanging up in said house. One night some people break in and threaten her, and the husband leaps from the painting with sword in hand and fights them, before vanishing back into the painting. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Mar 19, 2015 01:17
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There was a book I read over a decade ago about a bunch of people that used their version of the Internet by utilizing virtual reality devices to effectively "travel" between sites/places. Afterwards the users would log off and return later. However they encountered a young boy that never logged off and he also couldn't remember how, when or why he was there. The story is basically a journey about people who try to figure out why this boy can't log off and who he is. Eventually it turns out the boy is really a girl that is in a permanent coma and that her guardians didn't want to euthanize her so they plugged her into the Internet forever. That's as much as I can remember and hope that it's accurate because like I said I read this book a looooong time ago and I can't remember the title or author of it anymore.
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Mar 19, 2015 05:55
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Sir Winston Beehill posted:There was a book I read over a decade ago about a bunch of people that used their version of the Internet by utilizing virtual reality devices to effectively "travel" between sites/places. Afterwards the users would log off and return later. However they encountered a young boy that never logged off and he also couldn't remember how, when or why he was there. The story is basically a journey about people who try to figure out why this boy can't log off and who he is. Eventually it turns out the boy is really a girl that is in a permanent coma and that her guardians didn't want to euthanize her so they plugged her into the Internet forever. Tad William's Otherland series. e: maybe.
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Mar 19, 2015 06:10
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mirthdefect posted:Tad William's Otherland series. I have struggled for years to remember what that book was called and in under an hour I don't just get told the title and author but also that it's a series. Goons are amazing, thanks mirthdefect!
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Mar 19, 2015 06:47
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It's been a long time since I've read those books but I don't remember the plot of Otherland being anything like that.
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Mar 19, 2015 11:08
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It... kind of is but that'd be a lot of spoilers. Suffice to say, if you go to reread Otherland with that summary in your mind, there are going to be some surprises in store for you. Please report back when you read it if it was Otherland, because that's a pretty interesting way to recall and think about it. Because there's a very curious mix of right and wrong in that.
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Mar 19, 2015 11:39
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I read the book 11 years ago so any inconsistencies are just me jumbling stuff up with other things along the way. I checked out the synopsis and there's many things that began to ring a bell, unless there's another story out there that involves VR, fantasy settings and people in comas.
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Mar 19, 2015 11:58
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Sir Winston Beehill posted:unless there's another story out there that involves VR, fantasy settings and people in comas. You have NO idea.
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Mar 19, 2015 12:07
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Haha I guess not. Anyways I ordered the books off eBay so if it turns out it's not Overworld, I'll have a section of new material to read on the plane
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Mar 19, 2015 13:29
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Mammon Loves You posted:Born Into Light by Paul Samuel Jacobs? I know this is a bit late, but you are a wizard. Thanks!
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Mar 19, 2015 14:28
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froglet posted:I know this is a bit late, but you are a wizard. Thanks! As a note to other lurkers, late is better than never, there's nothing more disappointing than not getting a confirm/deny. I read the first book of Otherland but floundered around book 2, Tad Williams writes some cool stuff but he doesn't half drag it out sometimes.
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Mar 19, 2015 14:33
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Oh Noetry posted:I'm searching for a book I loved as a kid so I can pass it on to my step children. It's an Australian history book, illustrated, and starts with stories about the dreamtime, covers the gold rush, Ned Kelly gang, Woollawarre Bennelong, the stump jump plough, I think there was a section on some famous tennis players? Towards the end there's stuff on Parliament House as well. Full page illustrations with text over them. I was born in 1990 so the book must have come out 1985 to 1995, and we had a hard cover copy of it. Hoping a fellow Ausgoon sees this and recognises it! Not sure if this is very helpful, but I vaguely recall seeing a book like that - it was called History of Australia (funnily enough). I don't remember it at all, so no idea how helpful this is - then again, I don't think there's going to be that many illustrated Australian history books...
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Mar 19, 2015 15:06
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So there was a book I read a really long time ago, but I can only remember vague details about it. It was a sci-fi, and I'm pretty sure the setting was some kind of space-ship/plane. The main character is a young girl(?) carrying something super important. The part I remember most of all is that some crazy warlike alien infiltrates the space-ship/plane before it departs, and it kills someone by punching the cartilage of their nose into their brain. Apparently this way of killing is so characteristic of that race that everybody in the book immediately knew there was one on board.
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Mar 22, 2015 00:39
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Puzzle Thing posted:So there was a book I read a really long time ago, but I can only remember vague details about it. It was a sci-fi, and I'm pretty sure the setting was some kind of space-ship/plane. The main character is a young girl(?) carrying something super important. The part I remember most of all is that some crazy warlike alien infiltrates the space-ship/plane before it departs, and it kills someone by punching the cartilage of their nose into their brain. Apparently this way of killing is so characteristic of that race that everybody in the book immediately knew there was one on board. This sounds familiar, but I can't remember the title or author. If I'm remembering the same book, the super important thing was gold in color--maybe egg shaped? At one point the young girl main character used a melty chocolate bar to make a handprint on a crate she needed to come back and check later, which allowed her to mark it while the bad guys assumed she was just a stupid messy kid. The girl could also see shapes in hyperspace, which was unusual, because most people in that setting just got sick looking at it. I'm looking for a story which was science fiction, and most of the people were genetically engineered to be genius supermodel/athletes. The main character was a teenage girl who was not genetically modified, and who was sort of frumpy and overweight. Other kids insult her by calling her TB, for "throwback"--basically calling her a Neanderthal. At one point she mentions that she's so saggy that she can hold a stylus under her breast. She's mad at her parents for not modifying her like everyone else. Then there's some terrible disease that goes around, and it turns out that one of the standard modifications that almost everyone has makes you super susceptible to this disease, and most of her classmates die.
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Mar 22, 2015 05:30
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