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Syd Midnight posted:Wait, what? Read the posts above you
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Oct 29, 2016 01:38
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Syd Midnight posted:Wait, what? If you say you don't like the last few Discworld books apparently that makes you an arsehole or something. 
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Oct 29, 2016 04:39
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Tiggum posted:If you say you don't like the last few Discworld books apparently that makes you an arsehole or something. It's more that, in addition to it being pretty crass to look at a dude dying of a personality-destroying degenerative brain disease and complain about his writing getting worse, it's also just an uninteresting, unfunny topic that's been done to death in the thread. At least the ever-recurring Piers Anthony chat involves at least one fresh horror story every go-round.
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Oct 29, 2016 05:05
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no one has ever accused goons of suffering from an overabundance of tact
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Oct 29, 2016 05:27
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there wolf posted:I did like the other plotlines. But it was infuriating that Sanderson had built up a heroine, then made her kind of useless, and then compounded her uselessness with a love triangle...between a guy and his evil twin. Someday I'm going to waste his time by asking how much Days of Our Lives viewing makes up his writing process. Eh she single handedly won a war. Far from useless. The love triangle was just an attempt to have Vin be torn between who she was and who she was, nut yeah it wasn't done well.
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Oct 29, 2016 05:36
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there wolf posted:Are we doing a bad sequel/later in the series theme? I was pretty pissed off with Well of Ascention. Mistborn makes it pretty clear who the hero of book two is/should be, and yet she's spends a good chunk of it totally paralyzed by self-doubt and indecision. And then an honest to god evil twin of her love interest shows up and she can't choose between them! Turned me off Sanderson completely. First off, I agree, Well of Ascension sucks and goes on way too long. It's Sanderon's worst example of 'all the plot progression is right at the end'. Second, Zane is 100% using his emotional control abilities on Vin, and once you start looking for it it's super noticeable. Even then she never really gets swayed too far towards him.
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Oct 29, 2016 08:13
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there wolf posted:Are we doing a bad sequel/later in the series theme? I was pretty pissed off with Well of Ascention. Mistborn makes it pretty clear who the hero of book two is/should be, and yet she's spends a good chunk of it totally paralyzed by self-doubt and indecision. And then an honest to god evil twin of her love interest shows up and she can't choose between them! Turned me off Sanderson completely. Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman was a weird sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz. For one thing a major part of the plot was the main character's quest for a really tight pussy.
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Oct 29, 2016 09:54
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Antivehicular posted:It's more that, in addition to it being pretty crass to look at a dude dying of a personality-destroying degenerative brain disease and complain about his writing getting worse, it's also just an uninteresting, unfunny topic that's been done to death in the thread. At least the ever-recurring Piers Anthony chat involves at least one fresh horror story every go-round. The only writing by Piers I like and still remember is his afterword to some book detailing him suffering from kidney stones
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Oct 29, 2016 11:18
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I thought that the Thomas Covenant books were... ok. They had a lot of awkwardness, but they didn't try to excuse it - in the first book the main character, who is a leper who shows up in the fantasy world whenever he blacks out, is cured by the nature of the world he finds himself in - however due to certain parts of his body working properly after so long the rush is too great and he goes temporarily nuts and rapes the girl who was showing him around. However, he never stops feeling like poo poo about it, it's not something he ever allows himself to get over. An interesting thing as well is that time passes differently in the fantasy world - in the second book he is in his house a few hours after his initial blackout and is hit in an arson attack (he's not well liked because of his disease) and passes out again through smoke inhalation, and when he wakes up in the other world he finds that hundreds of years have passed and he is now a legendary figure - however for him it has only been a few hours. He feels ludicrously awkward about his crime because the world (or those who knew of it) has forgotten about it and all who did know are long dead, so noone is able to admonish him the way he feels he deserves, and even the victim herself was too nice to call him out on it, so he never gets any catharsis - noone ever punishes him for it and that only makes things feel worse for him, as he gets no closure. As the series goes on he gradually becomes a better person, becoming more legitimately heroic, but he never lets himself forget what he did. I found there was also some interesting mythology stuff, like Thomas finding that the minions of evil weren't all that bad, it was their boss who was the problem, as he befriends one who kinda becomes the team's mascot, and there was some cool imagery with the giants. I think he also has a few interesting philosophical conversations with the villain. It's just tricky to get past the initial "Lowest Point" of Thomas's Arc as I'm not so sure how well it was pulled off, and it may have driven people away before it could get interesting. BioEnchanted has a new favorite as of 13:11 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 13:08
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Antivehicular posted:It's more that, in addition to it being pretty crass to look at a dude dying of a personality-destroying degenerative brain disease and complain about his writing getting worse, it's also just an uninteresting, unfunny topic that's been done to death in the thread. At least the ever-recurring Piers Anthony chat involves at least one fresh horror story every go-round. This. People keep going into this cycle of "The later books aren't as good... probably because of alzheimers...but the later books aren't as good...probably because of alzheimers... but the later books aren't as good" and I can't, for the life of me, understand why anyone thinks it's worth engaging in for more than two full rotations
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Oct 29, 2016 14:57
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Syd Midnight posted:That bad? I don't disagree, The Dark Half was bad enough that I don't even remember it. Like Timescape, The Dark Half is one of those books where the author's intent is glaringly obvious but so poorly executed that turning pages became a chore. The intent of Timescape was to write a sci-fi book that was less genre and more literature: this is abundantly clear from the lengths to which it goes to describe the home lives of the scientist characters, lives that are not interesting or notable at all. It spends a long time on characters that don't merit that kind of attention. We are told many of the characters walk a fine line and play lots of games to keep highly speculative scientific projects financed but we're never shown it. About the only interesting "humanities" part is where a scientist has to defend himself against accusations of being a crank, defending his reputation, attempting to keep his doctoral student out of the shitstorm, etc. It was also clearly the only non-sci-fi part of the book written by Benford instead of his sister in law, who has very obviously ghostwritten half the novel, the two halves then badly sewn together. The pace is lethargic, spending entire chapters on goddamned dinner parties while the world is literally ending (without acknowledging the fact, if this sounded defensible), and it only picks up at the end, but then it rushes through the ending with one of the most obvious, cringeworthy TV news exposition scenes I've ever seen that wasn't a joke at the expense of the cliche. It tries to be high-brow sci-fi but in the end it amounts to a techno thriller without the fun or even a sense of urgency. I've read it in the Italian translation or I'd copy-paste excerpts to give you an idea The intent of The Dark Half is making the case that Stephen King is, in fact, a hardened bad rear end. Lots of King novels and stories make this point (especially the Bachman books), but The Dark Half is explicitly about it. Well sorry King, but you never convinced me before and you didn't convince me this time. It was really, really hard to read it to the end, because unlike Running Man, The Mist, Tommyknockers (off the top of my head, stories with a defiant, rugged but intelligent man from Maine who likes beer a little too much), there was nothing else to the story. Like a fridge full of condiments and no food Syd Midnight posted:his worst stuff tends to have the opposite effect. Trutht me, I'm a politheman. You shut your pie hole, The Library Policeman is a fantastically creepy story. Like It in single-dose pill form. If I had to criticize King for something that isn't his incredibly unrealistic image of himself (at least he dealt with it as an adult instead of, you know, John Ringo) is that he may write a lot, but he keeps writing the same two or three books again and again Syd Midnight posted:But the phrase "dark half" reminds me of Cell, because the first half of that book was some of his best flat-out action/horror, while the second half was so awful that I only finished it out of spite. What a forgettable book, I can't even remember much of it. I used to hate how it was written, short chapters ending with a smart quip. King had never written like that and I had no idea what the hell he had in mind with using such an annoying structure. Well, I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road now, and what can I say, mystery solved e: The Road was published after Cell? 
hackbunny has a new favorite as of 15:49 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 15:37
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chernobyl kinsman posted:no one has ever accused goons of suffering from an overabundance of tact Take a look at the history of GBS sometime before you say something like that The reason that GBS temporarily became a shelter for neonazis and misogynists was precisely because the rules before that resulted in a perceived overabundance of tact
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Oct 29, 2016 16:32
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Somfin posted:Take a look at the history of GBS sometime before you say something like that temporarily?
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Oct 29, 2016 16:40
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Alhazred posted:Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman was a weird sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz. For one thing a major part of the plot was the main character's quest for a really tight pussy.
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Oct 29, 2016 17:21
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Is Cursed Child a novelization of the play, or just the play? Might just work better on the stage. That sequel series Card did about Bean long after all the Ender books was pretty rotten. I was less impressed with the Ender books reading them as an adult, but I didn't feel like I'd made a terrible mistake picking them back up again. Those Bean books should have stayed safely locked away in childhood nostalgia land.
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Oct 29, 2016 17:53
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pookel posted:I'm thinking of all the long-awaited sequels to cult classic/fan favorite books, and I can't come up with a single one that wasn't terrible. Has it EVER been done well? Tehanu was awful, everyone said the new Harry Potter book was awful (I haven't read it myself) ... The new Harry Potter wasn't really a book, and it also wasn't actually written by Rowling. The play was pretty well received I believe, but no one who read it seemed to understand that play scripts aren't really meant to be read to get the full effect. The script was okay. It felt like it was a screenplay rather than meant for stage, which is a problem a lot of modern plays have. e:b, and yeah, the Shadow series just kept getting worse. I was young enough that I bought into them as they started to come out. I wanted more political intrigue and war games like the original novel, so the Bean books seemed more my speed than the Speaker for the Dead books. I know now it's all awful, but I think everything that happened to Petra pissed me off the worst. Poor Miserable Gurgi has a new favorite as of 18:00 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 17:56
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The first Shadow book was weird because it was basically Card stating that Ender didn't do anything and it was really Bean behind the scenes.
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Oct 29, 2016 18:28
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Orson Scott Card is an incredibly weird fuckup, and I'm not sure why anyone ever would read anything he's made in the past 16 years.
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Oct 29, 2016 19:35
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hackbunny posted:You shut your pie hole, The Library Policeman is a fantastically creepy story. Like It in single-dose pill form. If I had to criticize King for something that isn't his incredibly unrealistic image of himself (at least he dealt with it as an adult instead of, you know, John Ringo) is that he may write a lot, but he keeps writing the same two or three books again and again I maintain that King is about 1000% better when writing at sub-novel length, especially writing short stories. A lot of his short work has really stupid ideas, but when those stupid ideas have to be sustained for 15-20 pages instead of 400, he's generally able to keep them tight and interesting/scary instead of going "welp, I'm out of ideas 200 pages in, time for a magic Downs kid."
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Oct 29, 2016 20:05
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Poor Miserable Gurgi posted:The new Harry Potter wasn't really a book, and it also wasn't actually written by Rowling. The play was pretty well received I believe, but no one who read it seemed to understand that play scripts aren't really meant to be read to get the full effect. The script was okay. It felt like it was a screenplay rather than meant for stage, which is a problem a lot of modern plays have. I don't think there's any acting that could make "You're upsetting the dementors and ruining Voldemort day" not cause the audience to burst out laughing.
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Oct 29, 2016 20:09
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pookel posted:I'm thinking of all the long-awaited sequels to cult classic/fan favorite books, and I can't come up with a single one that wasn't terrible. Has it EVER been done well? Tehanu was awful, everyone said the new Harry Potter book was awful (I haven't read it myself) ... Dracula the Un-dead was pretty loving bad, as was that new Hitchhiker's book, so this theory holds up so far.
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Oct 29, 2016 22:02
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Poor Miserable Gurgi posted:The new Harry Potter wasn't really a book, and it also wasn't actually written by Rowling. The play was pretty well received I believe, but no one who read it seemed to understand that play scripts aren't really meant to be read to get the full effect. The script was okay. It felt like it was a screenplay rather than meant for stage, which is a problem a lot of modern plays have. "Not getting the full effect" doesn't really deflect criticisms about the plot being terrible, every returning character being completely inconsistent with the original versions, the time-travel elements being completely opposite to those from the original, and the general baffling stupidity of certain scenes (the old lady on the train, for example). The play itself has been well received for its staging, acting and effects, which is promising, but the script loving suuuucks.
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Oct 29, 2016 22:38
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pookel posted:I'm thinking of all the long-awaited sequels to cult classic/fan favorite books, and I can't come up with a single one that wasn't terrible. Has it EVER been done well? Tehanu was awful, everyone said the new Harry Potter book was awful (I haven't read it myself) ... Doctor Sleep is a sequel to The Shining, 36 years after the fact, which has been received very well.
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Oct 29, 2016 22:46
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Doctor Sleep was a good book, but not a good sequel.
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Oct 29, 2016 23:03
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Rush Limbo posted:Dracula the Un-dead was pretty loving bad, as was that new Hitchhiker's book, so this theory holds up so far. Is that the one written partly by Stoker's descendent that just shits all over Stoker himself? I don't recall specifics, but just constant reminders/implications that Stoker didn't know what he was doing and this book is the REAL story kind of crap. Oh, and Mina and Dracula were totally in love, of course. Blech! There's tons of crappy "how it really happened" romances like that with Dracula though (but a FMV story game of all things managed to avoid that)!
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Oct 30, 2016 00:17
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hackbunny posted:The intent of The Dark Half is making the case that Stephen King is, in fact, a hardened bad rear end. Lots of King novels and stories make this point (especially the Bachman books), but The Dark Half is explicitly about it. Well sorry King, but you never convinced me before and you didn't convince me this time. It was really, really hard to read it to the end, because unlike Running Man, The Mist, Tommyknockers (off the top of my head, stories with a defiant, rugged but intelligent man from Maine who likes beer a little too much), there was nothing else to the story. Like a fridge full of condiments and no food The Dark Half was about the wrong character. It should have been about Alexis Machine. I think it would have been a much better book if he hadn't revealed Stark so early. In essence, what he did with Secret Window, Secret Garden.
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Oct 30, 2016 02:11
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is that david mitchell
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Oct 30, 2016 02:32
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Xarbala posted:is that david mitchell
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Oct 30, 2016 02:40
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:No it's Robert Webb. No, you're thinking of the presenter of the German version of Numberwang.
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Oct 30, 2016 03:18
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Kay Kessler posted:I don't think there's any acting that could make "You're upsetting the dementors and ruining Voldemort day" not cause the audience to burst out laughing.
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Oct 30, 2016 04:46
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Antivehicular posted:I maintain that King is about 1000% better when writing at sub-novel length, especially writing short stories. A lot of his short work has really stupid ideas, but when those stupid ideas have to be sustained for 15-20 pages instead of 400, he's generally able to keep them tight and interesting/scary instead of going "welp, I'm out of ideas 200 pages in, time for a magic Downs kid." My absolute favorite stories that King wrote are actually his short stories that are just simple human drama. No horror.
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Oct 30, 2016 07:27
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Hate Fibration posted:My absolute favorite stories that King wrote are actually his short stories that are just simple human drama. No horror. In a way those are the scariest, because humans are the real monsters. 
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Oct 30, 2016 07:31
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Revival was amazing. The Wind Through the Keyhole was great too. Come to think about it, all of his recent work has been a few steps above most of his books edit: Full Dark, No Stars was also great. Cumslut1895 has a new favorite as of 09:29 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 09:26
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Under the Dome was complete poo poo. Reading that was probably what turned me off King for a good while.
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Oct 30, 2016 11:31
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Kay Kessler posted:Under the Dome was complete poo poo. Reading that was probably what turned me off King for a good while. Sounds like the TV show was the perfect adaption.
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Oct 30, 2016 11:31
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WickedHate posted:Sounds like the TV show was the perfect adaption.
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Oct 30, 2016 11:50
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Hate Fibration posted:My absolute favorite stories that King wrote are actually his short stories that are just simple human drama. No horror. I like the one where the narrator is shipwrecked on a desert island and eventually flips out and eats himself.
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Oct 30, 2016 11:58
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Wheat Loaf posted:I like the one where the narrator is shipwrecked on a desert island and eventually flips out and eats himself. Survivor Type! No, no, first he eats himself, then he flips out
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Oct 30, 2016 12:58
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Just like Steven King - he gets too full of himself then loses it completely :P
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Oct 30, 2016 13:21
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hackbunny posted:Survivor Type! No, no, first he eats himself, then he flips out I remember reading it at the same time as I read Chuck Palahniuk's short story "Guts". Taken together, they're certainly... something else. 
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Oct 30, 2016 13:54
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