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drat it, my copy of THE TRAITOR baru cormorant arrived early and I want to read it nowwwww but I have like 5 books on the go already. This is literally the worst.
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Sep 24, 2015 04:54
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just wait...baru cormorant gets pretty confusing with a lot of place names and people names, and if you're reading it at the same time as other stuff you'll probably miss out on a lot of enjoyment
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Sep 24, 2015 04:55
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Baru Cormorant is great, as everyone else has said. The first third or half or so in particular is an economics bureaucracy intrigue story, which made me so very happy.  Between this and The Goblin Emperor, I like where things are going. (Bonus points: the Imperial Radch trilogy?)
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Sep 24, 2015 05:36
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Between this and The Goblin Emperor, I like where things are going. (Bonus points: the Imperial Radch trilogy?) I was less impressed with those than with Three Body Problem, but they've got some things going for them that I hope catch on. I'll pick up Baru after I'm done with The Dark Forest.
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Sep 24, 2015 08:54
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Evfedu posted:A friend of mine has been ranting about Mistborn forever and I'm listening to the audiobook with this look on my face like someone's just farted under my nose. "Is he really- yes, yes he is actually going to tell me what power they're given by each metal and what the terminology is for how they use the metals and she is instantly going to learn what to do and how to do it". Like, I don't think he was tricking me, I just don't see what he saw in this homogeneous mass of archetypes and autistic focus on bland world-building. Ha! By strange coincidence I've also been reading Mistborn, and had that exact same reaction. The world fails to convince and the characters fail to interest- it's not so much a book as a narrative draped over a magic system. Though I also completely fell out with Abercrombie after Last Argument of Kings. I've had terrible luck with books lately. I keep buying them and they keep turning out to be poo poo.  Fortunately, Amazon finally deigned to release Baru Cormorant last night and I'm enjoying that immensely.
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Sep 24, 2015 12:07
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This might be better suited for the Abercrombie thread, but I got all of 30 pages in to Half a King before giving up. Reads like a freshman's C-papers from Creative Writing 101. I haven't read a more hackneyed beginning to a trilogy (or whatever) in many years. Why is this guy so hyped around here, exactly?
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Sep 24, 2015 12:26
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Autonomous Monster posted:Ha! By strange coincidence I've also been reading Mistborn, and had that exact same reaction. The world fails to convince and the characters fail to interest- it's not so much a book as a narrative draped over a magic system. Though I also completely fell out with Abercrombie after Last Argument of Kings. Funnily, a lot of the people I see praising Mistborn (and Sanderson in general) specifically cite the well-developed magic system as a reason they like it. I think some people just like taking a tour of a fantasy world that has well-realized and internally consistent physics rather than "and then the protagonist just pulls some magic out of his rear end", and don't much care about the story/characters because they're just an excuse to explore the world.
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Sep 24, 2015 12:48
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My friend is very much like that and recommended Mistborn to me for that exact reason. I gave him Dave Duncan's A Man of His Word to borrow and when he finished them his main complaint was that he didn't like the magic (more words of power known = more magic; more people know same word = less power from word). No mention of the politics or setting or other elements that made the series worthwhile.
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Sep 24, 2015 14:31
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Autonomous Monster posted:Ha! By strange coincidence I've also been reading Mistborn, and had that exact same reaction. The world fails to convince and the characters fail to interest- it's not so much a book as a narrative draped over a magic system. Though I also completely fell out with Abercrombie after Last Argument of Kings. What do you mean you fell out with Abercrombie after that book? Was it because of the book or did you think his other books bad? Because I generally liked his First Law trilogy, but I think all his following works were much weaker. Characters are certainly not Sanderson's strongest suite, but he became better with them in his latest books. On the other hand, the story is tightly plotted, and it resolves itself in a neat and timely fashion, which I though very refreshing after Robert Jordan just died and left the story of Wheel of Time even more open. I disagree that the world fails to convince, and I don't think that the story is just an excuse to see the magic system in action.
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Sep 24, 2015 14:58
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the phrase "of course" appears 114 time in alastair reynold's redemption ark that book got kind of grating and i think it had some serious flaws if memory serves absolution gap is not particularly well regarded? given i had some problems with redemption ark, should i go on?
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Sep 24, 2015 15:39
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No, in my opinion. I think Ark is a lot better than Gap. I really like the spaceship chase in Redemption Ark, it's neat.
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Sep 24, 2015 16:02
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Autonomous Monster posted:Fortunately, Amazon finally deigned to release Baru Cormorant last night and I'm enjoying that immensely. And done.  What a horrible, hateful, spiteful little book. I loved it. I don't think I'll ever read it again, because I don't think I'll ever want to put myself through that again, but I'm glad I read it. Torrannor posted:What do you mean you fell out with Abercrombie after that book? Was it because of the book or did you think his other books bad? Because I generally liked his First Law trilogy, but I think all his following works were much weaker. Well, this was back in 2008, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but basically I liked the first two books more for where I thought it was going than for themselves (always a mistake). Actually, I only really liked the first book; the second one failed to advance the plot in any way that I cared about. Anyway, then the third book arrived and everything I'd found interesting in the first book turned out to be going nowhere after all, and it collapsed into... I can't even remember. The empire is put to order, Bayaz reasserts his authority, everyone wanders off into the sunset, yada yada- it doesn't matter. I could probably have gotten past that, but then every character turns out to be an evil little poo poo. Except Glokta, maybe. Any development they've had is carefully excised and disposed of. In the end, nothing's changed and everybody's back exactly where they started, only more miserable. It felt like being slapped in the face- "Oh, you cared about these people? You were invested in this plot? Well gently caress you, buddy!" It felt like misery porn, essentially. There's probably an essay to be written on why I hated it so much here while being perfectly happy with stuff like Baru Cormorant, but I'm not going to bother. Torrannor posted:Characters are certainly not Sanderson's strongest suite, but he became better with them in his latest books. On the other hand, the story is tightly plotted, and it resolves itself in a neat and timely fashion, which I though very refreshing after Robert Jordan just died and left the story of Wheel of Time even more open. I disagree that the world fails to convince, and I don't think that the story is just an excuse to see the magic system in action. Well. I think a lot of fiction is about faith. They call it suspension of disbelief, but I'm not sure I like that term any more. The reader needs to want to be seduced; if a book does something to put them into a hostile mindset they're going to start holding it to a much higher standard than they otherwise would, and pick apart all the little imperfections they wouldn't have bothered with before. A lot of the early sections of the book are spent defining and organising allomancy, and I found it... overly schematic? Lacking in emotional texture? It didn't do a lot to buy faith with me, and Sanderson isn't a great prose stylist, either, which didn't help. So maybe I turned a more critical eye to the world-building than was justified. That said, I do think the world is unconvincing. That lack of emotional texture is the big problem here, too- this is a world with a burnt-out, red sun, choked by ash and carpeted in brown plants. It's a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but Sanderson never makes me feel that. The prose is flat. Hell, half the time I didn't remember that the sun was supposed to be red. It's the same problem with the society he presents, and the characters (Vin goes from hostile, withdrawn street urchin to bold vivacious socialite literally in a chapter break). I saw the same problem in his work on the Wheel of Time, to be honest with you. He crossed the ts and dotted the is smartly enough, to be sure, and marched the series to its conclusion in good time, but every time he had to write an emotional payoff he failed to deliver. Except I guess with Rand up Dragonmount.
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Sep 24, 2015 16:08
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Autonomous Monster posted:Ha! By strange coincidence I've also been reading Mistborn, and had that exact same reaction. The world fails to convince and the characters fail to interest- it's not so much a book as a narrative draped over a magic system. Though I also completely fell out with Abercrombie after Last Argument of Kings. Ironically he does the same thing in words of radiance and the other books in that series but it's not nearly as grating, I don't hate Szeth as much as most people do, and by the lightning storm fight I'd just decided that everybody was a super saiyan and went with it. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Sep 24, 2015 |
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Sep 24, 2015 16:52
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Argali posted:This might be better suited for the Abercrombie thread, but I got all of 30 pages in to Half a King before giving up. Reads like a freshman's C-papers from Creative Writing 101. I haven't read a more hackneyed beginning to a trilogy (or whatever) in many years. Why is this guy so hyped around here, exactly?
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Sep 24, 2015 16:52
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coyo7e posted:Yeah this got to me pretty bad in Mistborn, I began to think of the series as "rooftop-jumping porn" because it seemed to spend an interminable amount of time describing every shingle and nail that the character is pushing/pulling themselves around by - I remember setting my audiobook timer for 30 minutes and literally nothing happening except a character crossing the city by magically jumping around rooftops *again*. I like Audiobooks for going to sleep and commuting, and if nothing happens in the time it takes to fall asleep or get where I'm going, well, there's something wrong. And popping mana potions with scraps of metal was pretty dumb, especially making the reader painfully aware of how many potions and what kinds and how many fractions of their mana they had left to use at any given moment.. And the guys with spikes driven through their head was really dumb. And then I forgot what happened because the only interesting character died early and I finished book 2 without remembering it, and I think I finished book 3 because I can remember some of the plot stuff but nothing else. Basically I hated it. This is why I'd never listen to a Sanderson book in audio. Can't skim the blow-by-blow magic bullshit.
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Sep 24, 2015 17:02
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coyo7e posted:Ironically he does the same thing in words of radiance and the other books in that series but it's not nearly as grating, I don't hate Szeth as much as most people do, and by the lightning storm fight I'd just decided that everybody was a super saiyan and went with it. I think of every fight in that book as a WWE wrestling match, complete with introduction music.
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Sep 24, 2015 17:23
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coyo7e posted:Isn't that the one that he literally wrote for children? You could have fooled me, as far as I can tell it's aimed at adults.
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Sep 24, 2015 20:25
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Sanderson writes video game fantasy. In Stormlight Archives the characters even have talent trees when they level up.
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Sep 24, 2015 20:38
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I read The Three-body Problem it was okay, I guess. It was a much better translated bit of foreign literature than it was a sci-fi novel. That bit with the protons at the end was just silly. Did I miss something, or did it really take months (years?) for the players of Three Body to figure out the solution that was in the name of the game? Yeah, I know there was the thing with the suns obfuscating it a bit, but c'mon. Also: what sort of scientist would go "waaah, science is broken, better kill myself" rather than "ooh, cool" if they found the sort of results that the aliens were feeding them? I should really stop getting my expectations up so high for sci-fi flavours-of-the-month; this was a decent book, that kind of feels like it's from 30-40 years ago. P.S. The best part was where they cut a boat into slices with cheese wire.
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Sep 24, 2015 21:34
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thehomemaster posted:You could have fooled me, as far as I can tell it's aimed at adults. Yeah, the "Half A..." Trilogy is for young adults. I read them and thought the first two were barely passable and the third one is a massive pile of poo poo
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Sep 24, 2015 21:49
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Dzhay posted:I should really stop getting my expectations up so high for sci-fi flavours-of-the-month; this was a decent book, that kind of feels like it's from 30-40 years ago. I thought the best part was Yi confronting the women who killed her father and finding out there was no point in hurting them. Also, I looked up background after reading the book (I liked it way more than you did.) and maybe the reason it feels outdated is that China has much less of a science fiction tradition than we do. This is only starting to change recently with books like Three Body, and now the trilogy is a legit phenomenon over there.
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Sep 24, 2015 21:59
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thehomemaster posted:You could have fooled me, as far as I can tell it's aimed at adults. It's YA, like The Maze Runner, Divergent and The Hunger Games
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Sep 24, 2015 22:12
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Dzhay posted:I read The Three-body Problem it was okay, I guess. Not everyone was playing through the game at the same rate, and I don't remember a mention of any specific player taking months.
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Sep 24, 2015 22:30
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Solitair posted:I thought the best part was Yi confronting the women who killed her father and finding out there was no point in hurting them. Pretty sure it's just an homage to golden age sci fi. Just wait until The Dark Forest. It's a great book. Dunno what guy is on about.
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Sep 24, 2015 22:54
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thehomemaster posted:You could have fooled me, as far as I can tell it's aimed at adults. I thought the same.
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Sep 24, 2015 23:08
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Argali posted:I thought the same. It even won the 2015 Locus Award for best Young Adult Novel
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Sep 24, 2015 23:14
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less laughter posted:It even won the 2015 Locus Award for best Young Adult Novel It was pitched and marketed as Young Adult, but near as I can tell, it's mostly bought by his existing adult fans. And the deeper in I went, the more it read like his other books (not that I complained, I love his other books).
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Sep 25, 2015 06:32
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UK based Kindle users may be interested to know that the deal of the day is Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series. Rivers of London is 99p, the other four books are £2 each.
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Sep 25, 2015 09:14
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I'd say Half A King reads like Abercrombie doing YA, but the two sequels do not. (Also let's not YA shame, yeah? If loving Jack Reacher is considered a book for adults...) I enjoyed the series, anyway. I remember HaK having a really rough start, mind. I don't know how far you got, but hey. Torrannor posted:You should probably just stop, he doesn't get any better. In fact, he does things in book two that make him even more of a Mary Sue. And since Kvothe never stops being the narrator in his story he tells the Chronicler, it never stops to be all about him. Evil Fluffy posted:
And right now he's spent like four rambling pages telling us about a woman being the most beautiful beauty in all the beautiful world, no wait, that does not begin to describe her beauteous beauty, imagine if you will a beautiful day filled with beauty and that is only one percent of the beauty of which I speak and here is another rambling simile and a paragraph describing how I cannot describe this beauty and OH MY GOD. And that was AFTER he randomly made an entire one page chapter that could have just been a line saying "the crowd sobbed and cheered." Maybe it's because I'm an Abercrombie fan (and that dude is straight to the point), maybe it's because I cracked open Pratchett's Night Watch again the other day and the smooth, flowing, tight, peak-Pratchett prose is such a sharp contrast with Rothfuss's style - but this poo poo is excruciating.
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Sep 25, 2015 10:06
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VagueRant posted:Also let's not YA shame, yeah? Nobody is.
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Sep 25, 2015 10:31
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Let's not Jack Reacher shame, either. 
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Sep 25, 2015 11:03
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MrSmokes posted:I really liked Rendezvous with Rama and I'm looking for more books that are similar. I enjoy stories that are about exploring what remains of lost alien civilizations. I prefer stories with a lot of mystery, where not everything is carefully explained, and is instead left to your imagination. As long as the mystery isn't clearly a point where the author couldn't think of something good and cool, and just wanted to get out of having to explain it.
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Sep 25, 2015 16:57
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Not exactly the hard SF you may be looking for, but in this vein I loved Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy.
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Sep 25, 2015 17:37
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gvibes posted:Maybe Richard Russo's Ship of Fools. Also known as Unto Leviathan in some countries, if you're having trouble tracking it down.
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Sep 25, 2015 17:39
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Is Forge of Darkness (by Steven Erikson) worth reading? I enjoyed some of the Malazan books, but gave up before the end. This one's like a trilogy, so I'm hoping it's slightly more focused.
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Sep 25, 2015 17:54
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Uh, that's... difficult. I think it works pretty well alone but it won't be as mindblowing to you as it would be to the Malazan fanbase who just got all their pet theories shattered by it. Best I can tell you is to try. There's going to be lot of artificial foreign terms, though.
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Sep 25, 2015 18:04
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Soviet Canuckistan posted:Is Forge of Darkness (by Steven Erikson) worth reading? I enjoyed some of the Malazan books, but gave up before the end. This one's like a trilogy, so I'm hoping it's slightly more focused. I thought it was great. I think you could consider it more focused in that it has a smaller scope/world than the main Malazan series so far, but the writing's also more complex than those books imo.
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Sep 25, 2015 18:08
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less laughter posted:Nobody is.
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Sep 25, 2015 18:29
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Soviet Canuckistan posted:Is Forge of Darkness (by Steven Erikson) worth reading? I enjoyed some of the Malazan books, but gave up before the end. This one's like a trilogy, so I'm hoping it's slightly more focused. It's on sale for the kindle daily deal for $3.00 today. That's probably why you are asking, but just in case anyone else wants to grab it on sale I figured I'd mention it.
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Sep 25, 2015 18:42
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I'm reading Ian McDonald's new one, Luna: New Moon. It's got really interesting world building but fits his recent trend of depressing as hell characters. I was hoping for more Desolation Road blatant weirdness I guess.
ShutteredIn fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Sep 26, 2015 |
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Sep 26, 2015 05:57
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