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Autonomous Monster posted:Yes, the second book is generally considered the weakest part of the series. I'd definitely say check out the third and see if it hooks you again. I'm pretty sure I've read all the released books in this series and the only big problem I've had with it is the Napoleon analogue character and how Wexler teases from the beginning whether the dude has sinister motivations or an evil masterplan, and just dragged his feet on giving answers or clearly developing that aspect of the story way too long for me, and then to top my annoyance off, the character's captured and has some type of mind control spell, or some poo poo like that, put on him at the very end of the latest volume. Maybe I'm remembering the exact details of the ending wrong, but I do remember it feeling hamfisted and like a cop out to me.
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Jan 2, 2017 21:00
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Autonomous Monster posted:Going back to this for the second. You can real books as cheap as ebooks now??? Oh dear no, but sometimes you can't get ebooks for less than physical copies.
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Jan 2, 2017 21:14
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Joining the "Sabetha is a lovely character" crew
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Jan 2, 2017 21:29
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Chairchucker posted:A friend of mine arranges her books by colour but it's mostly because that's how she most easily mentally associates them and so can easily find them. vOv Autonomous Monster posted:Going back to this for the second. You can real books as cheap as ebooks now??? Of course there were NO loving PAGE NUMBERS AT ALL so I had to go to the library with the instructor's reading list and then look up and write down the "location" number for each and every page or two for every week of the class, but I did save money!
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Jan 2, 2017 21:30
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Autonomous Monster posted:Going back to this for the second. You can real books as cheap as ebooks now??? Wordery, Amazon Marketplace, eBay and Book Depository can all help you out there. The bulk of a lot of the cost is usually the P&P depending on what you buy.
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Jan 2, 2017 21:34
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holocaust bloopers posted:Joining the "Sabetha is a lovely character" crew No reason to start having correct opinions this late in life.
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Jan 2, 2017 22:07
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Autonomous Monster posted:Going back to this for the second. You can real books as cheap as ebooks now??? Ebooks are subject to tax in the UK. Print books are not. Hence, paperbacks are often cheaper, especially for new releases. The fact that an ebook copy has a seperate ISBN from a paperback or hardback copy (which themselves have unique ISBNs) and is therefore a distinct product as far as pricing is concerned is not used to account for this in your favour. Instead they bank on you enjoying the convenience enough to pay an extra £1-2 or whatever. It's still changing a bunch, though. Recently I've noticed a trend towards the resurgence of the omnibus in ebook form - collections of novels and novellas from a dozen different authors on a similar theme, which are sold for a couple of quid - and a bunch of closures on the marketplace where even inflated P&P wasn't enough to keep places in business any longer. Paper books rest much easier on the face if you've got trouble sleeping, but I just don't have the space for them any longer. Hooray for the smallest average house sizes in europe.
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Jan 2, 2017 22:49
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Autonomous Monster posted:Going back to this for the second. You can real books as cheap as ebooks now??? As an example keeping with some recent discussion going on here, The Republic of Thieves is 8.99 on Kindle and 8.09 in paperback. I was more referring to Bestsellers, though, which tend to stay fairly expensive (as far as ebooks go). It's easy to overlook how jacked up eBook prices are if you avoid bestsellers (or only buy them during sales), but that's still where the big publishers make a fair amount of their money.
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Jan 3, 2017 02:19
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I buy my physical books by the linear foot
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Jan 3, 2017 03:38
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andrew smash posted:Physical books are much easier to flip through quickly, annotate, etc.
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Jan 3, 2017 04:02
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90s Cringe Rock posted:There's nothing wrong with arranging books to look pretty, especially if you do most of your reading with ebooks and only buy hardcopies if they're something you really want to own, or because they were cheap secondhand books, or you were stuck waiting for a train and your phone's battery was too low to get a few hours of reading done. SMDH if you have enough shelf space to organize instead of stuffing books in anywhere it looks like they might fit.
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Jan 3, 2017 04:17
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fritz posted:SMDH if you have enough shelf space to organize instead of stuffing books in anywhere it looks like they might fit. That was me until I moved into my house. With a total north of 3500 books (25% hardcover or reference). NEVER AGAIN. The vast majority were donated to libraries around the area (paperbacks usually are taken for their book sales) or other charities that took them. Many of them have been repurchased as ebooks, which is now my go to format. gently caress packing boxes and then having to move those boxes. gently caress it right in the rear end. On the minus side, I have a real nice set of oak bookshelves my dad made for me that were about 14 feet wide going unused. Fortunately, he made them modular and easy to take apart, so they're living in my storage space right now. Ready for the day I lose my mind and start buying predominantly physical books again. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Jan 3, 2017 |
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Jan 3, 2017 04:45
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LOL if you buy your own books, the government will buy them for you and store them in multiple aesthetically pleasing building and then transport them to the facility of your choice on demand.
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Jan 3, 2017 05:18
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You know one of my biggest pet peeves in sf/f novels? Protagonists with loving eidetic/perfect memories. I've noticed it coming up a lot lately and wonder if it's a symptom of the authors' fantasies, or maybe just a shovel-load of  ?fritz posted:SMDH if you have enough shelf space to organize instead of stuffing books in anywhere it looks like they might fit. Most normal people might just toss out the shelves and like, put up a painting, or maybe a little table with some knick-knacks, or maybe a lamp or something. But people who really want to feel like they're literate end up buying "by the foot" books with titles which probably strike them the same way I shoveled through the dump-bin behind the bookstore I used to work at when I was 19.. I'd just grab a box, and then throw anything that looked vaguely interesting or which sounded smart - and hope that the mall security guys didn't come by before I was finished.
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Jan 3, 2017 05:22
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Autonomous Monster posted:Going back to this for the second. You can real books as cheap as ebooks now??? Some bookstore opened up in my hometown a while back (2nd and Charles) that buys used books and sells them for actual reasonable prices. I picked up a copy of Hyperion for $2.30 or so the other day. They also sell new stuff. The place was pretty cool, it was like the GameStop style of store without the rip-offs or pushy salespeople. Not sure how much they give when you sell books back to them though. Apparently it's a chain, but I haven't heard of it before. Probably the only way physical stores can compete with Amazon and ebooks now.
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Jan 3, 2017 05:56
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coyo7e posted:Of course there were NO loving PAGE NUMBERS AT ALL so I had to go to the library with the instructor's reading list and then look up and write down the "location" number for each and every page or two for every week of the class, but I did save money! The fact that some eBooks only have locations and no page numbers is the most irritating part of reading eBooks. I'm currently reading a nonfiction eBook with an index that refers to page numbers it doesn't loving have. I still prefer them over physical books because of storage reasons and ease of highlighting and bookmarking, though.
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Jan 3, 2017 06:08
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2nd and Charles is pretty great. I've found some real gems, both from a reader standpoint and as a collector.
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Jan 3, 2017 06:08
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Solitair posted:The fact that some eBooks only have locations and no page numbers is the most irritating part of reading eBooks. I'm currently reading a nonfiction eBook with an index that refers to page numbers it doesn't loving have. But having no page numbers is absolute bullshit in ebooks and someone needs to get some standards set up - not like it takes any large amount of effort to get that poo poo synched. But to manually reference the hardcopy and the ebook to get the loc versions for every page number for my class on sustainable construction standards? Yeah that took me 3 loving hours, and the instructor didn't even give a gently caress when I gave them a copy in case other students ran into that huge wall of  There are a few things I really like to have in hardcopy - reference books and the like - because it's just super nice to be able to whip out a 500-700 page manual and flip to the page to show the specific syntax and usage of some formula from an obscure code language that I half-forgot how to use... I love having a book that weighs a few pounds that I can lay out on my lap below the keyboard coyo7e fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Jan 3, 2017 |
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Jan 3, 2017 06:14
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flosofl posted:gently caress packing boxes and then having to move those boxes. gently caress it right in the rear end. don't have nearly that many books, but I switched mostly to ebooks a long time ago and wish my wife would as well. moving boxes and boxes of books is the worst part of moving, they always end up super heavy. Next we should talk about how absolutely stupid dust jackets and hard covers are.
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Jan 3, 2017 06:36
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Nippashish posted:You will be one of the hipsters. Hipsters aren't real I'm afraid. Safety Biscuits posted:Nice to see you defending Tolkien for a change coyo7e posted:Unironically, most of the hipsters I know who collect books, only do so in order to do that "Arranged by color" poo poo on their shelves - and of course to put stuff like FInnegan's Wake and Gravity's Rainbow where people can see the and assume that said hipster is literate. those aren't hipsters, they're just people who like good books
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Jan 3, 2017 07:05
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fritz posted:SMDH if you have enough shelf space to organize instead of stuffing books in anywhere it looks like they might fit. Yep. According to my house, the only proper way of arranging your bookshelves is with the paperbacks two rows deep and more paperbacks lying down on top of those rows, with any larger format books migrating to the ends of each shelf, and perhaps one shelf of hardbacks fairly nicely arranged but maybe some books lying on top of them too if they couldn't fit in anywhere else. Indexed using the infallible system of I know my copy of Cyteen is somewhere around this area. So I guess arranging my books by colour wouldn't really matter to me other than requiring about 2.5 times the shelf space. Nowadays, almost every new book I buy I do so on on Kindle anyway.
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Jan 3, 2017 07:12
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i wonder how many fewer deaths due to fire could be prevented every year if possession of paper books was made illegal
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Jan 3, 2017 07:16
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Baloogan posted:i wonder how many fewer deaths due to fire could be prevented every year if possession of paper books was made illegal they'd be no more fires, and firemen would have to resort to burning books.
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Jan 3, 2017 07:23
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A human heart posted:His prose isn't very good. So you prefer his poetry? Controversial!
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Jan 3, 2017 09:45
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Safety Biscuits posted:So you prefer his poetry? Controversial! its also not very good, however he did write a poem about a fat cat that likes to eat cream which is a lot better than writing about space ships
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Jan 3, 2017 10:00
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Tokamak posted:they'd be no more fires, and firemen would have to resort to burning books. You could see this reference coming from alpha centauri.well done. Tolkien also wrote a wonderfull whimsical short story about what a pain in the rear end c.s. Lewis was so hes got that going for him.
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Jan 3, 2017 10:49
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less laughter posted:In what way do the Latro books have evocative and lurid prose? They are expressly written in a workmanlike voice of a commoner/soldier, not a professional writer or poet. It's inherent to the story. They have the same style as Pirate Freedom. alright in those i listed the prose isn't the same style as the others, but it still has a more interesting and unusual set of imagery and the point certainly goes for the solar books. wizard/knight is also not in a more erudite style, but still has plenty of evocative passages.
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Jan 3, 2017 11:19
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coyo7e posted:This totally works if your entire library is nothing but reference manuals in series, and full copies of collected editions of etc etc In her case it works with a whole bunch of fiction novels I dunno man different people remember things differently.
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Jan 3, 2017 14:58
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I sort my library by genre and then author and get triggered by authors that write in more than one genre because now I either have mystery stuff in my horror area or an author spread across several shelves.
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Jan 3, 2017 15:22
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Hobnob posted:Yep. According to my house, the only proper way of arranging your bookshelves is with the paperbacks two rows deep and more paperbacks lying down on top of those rows, with any larger format books migrating to the ends of each shelf, and perhaps one shelf of hardbacks fairly nicely arranged but maybe some books lying on top of them too if they couldn't fit in anywhere else. Indexed using the infallible system of I know my copy of Cyteen is somewhere around this area.
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Jan 3, 2017 16:04
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Hobnob posted:Yep. According to my house, the only proper way of arranging your bookshelves is with the paperbacks two rows deep and more paperbacks lying down on top of those rows, with any larger format books migrating to the ends of each shelf, and perhaps one shelf of hardbacks fairly nicely arranged but maybe some books lying on top of them too if they couldn't fit in anywhere else. Indexed using the infallible system of I know my copy of Cyteen is somewhere around this area. That's my family's traditional way of organizing books too.  Although all the C.J. Cherryh tends to gravitate to the same set of shelves so it's easy to find.
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Jan 3, 2017 17:30
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Ornamented Death posted:I sort my library by genre and then author and get triggered by authors that write in more than one genre because now I either have mystery stuff in my horror area or an author spread across several shelves. 
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Jan 3, 2017 19:26
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I collect books, so having a large number is a feature, not a bug. I also only plan on moving, at most, two more times in my life, so I'm not overly concerned about that.
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Jan 3, 2017 20:03
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I'm a little over halfway through Justin Cronin's The Passage and am curious about opinions on the later books in the series? This one comes across a lot like WWZ met The Stand and while it's not Cormac McCarthy level by any means, I'm not really sure how far it can go past the first novel, or if it goes all "Coyote" (Allen Steele's) and end up with a lot of society-building and civil wars and whatnot
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Jan 4, 2017 05:06
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coyo7e posted:I'm a little over halfway through Justin Cronin's The Passage and am curious about opinions on the later books in the series? This one comes across a lot like WWZ met The Stand and while it's not Cormac McCarthy level by any means, I'm not really sure how far it can go past the first novel, or if it goes all "Coyote" (Allen Steele's) and end up with a lot of society-building and civil wars and whatnot The later volumes definitely had diminishing returns for me. While they do have some flashback sections to the modern apocalypse-going-down timeframe, there's a lot more of the future society building n maintaining, as well as civil warring you predicted. I like Cronin's writing, I just grew tired of this setting and it's characters, and I hope he moves on to something different and shorter.
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Jan 4, 2017 05:41
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coyo7e posted:I'm a little over halfway through Justin Cronin's The Passage and am curious about opinions on the later books in the series? This one comes across a lot like WWZ met The Stand and while it's not Cormac McCarthy level by any means, I'm not really sure how far it can go past the first novel, or if it goes all "Coyote" (Allen Steele's) and end up with a lot of society-building and civil wars and whatnot The second book has about an equal focus on the pre-breakout phase, and I think the core future conflict in the second is more interesting. It doesn't go far enough into the future for a substantial amount of post-apocalypse history to elapse, though the state of society is certainly a central element. I haven't read the third. I didn't really care for a lot of the characters, either. I thought Peter was by far the weakest. Everyone talks about how good and cool he is but he's a bland nothing. Wolgast and Alicia are much more interesting.
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Jan 4, 2017 08:23
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coyo7e posted:I'm a little over halfway through Justin Cronin's The Passage and am curious about opinions on the later books in the series? This one comes across a lot like WWZ met The Stand and while it's not Cormac McCarthy level by any means, I'm not really sure how far it can go past the first novel, or if it goes all "Coyote" (Allen Steele's) and end up with a lot of society-building and civil wars and whatnot I'm probably in the minority here but I think that while the quality did dip in book two, he pulled it out of the nosedive in book three and I think he did some really interesting things with the characters and the setting, stuff that took me by surprise. He doesn't get back to the pacing quality of the first one but his prose gets much better and he's able to focus more on character growth on some of the figures who I feel weren't fleshed out earlier. I saw him speak when he came out to Sydney for his book tour earlier this year and he said the third one is his personal favorite and was the most enjoyable to write, because it let him utilize a lot of stylistic things that he accidentally locked himself out of in the first two novels. There's some first person narration that I think reads much better than his third person. I don't know that I'd go back and re-read any of them anytime soon, but I don't regret slogging through the second and parts of the third to get the complete story.
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Jan 4, 2017 08:51
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I tried to read the first one but just.... ugh it was a slog. Did the story ever get better? I made it to the point where The nuke went off and the weird kid was some kinda messiah for the new vampire weirdos that they were experimenting on. I haven't read it in a while, so I might be incredibly off on the summary. It just... I dunno. It didn't really seem to flow very well as a book. Also I was kinda tired of the LET'S GENETICALLY ENGINEER THIS CRAZY rear end SUPERMAN CAPTAIN AMERICA poo poo USING PRISONERS AND MURDERERS BECAUSE HOLY gently caress NOTHING CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG WHOOPS OH gently caress SOMETHING WENT WRONG plot idea. Just seems like before they even began someone would have raised a hand and went "Wait, have you ever SEEN a horror movie?".
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Jan 4, 2017 10:55
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I made it through the first book but it was so big and such a slog I never bothered to read the rest. I also found the characters to be bland and the world to be uninteresting.
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Jan 4, 2017 12:55
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Help me, thread! I am desperate for a new fantasy novel to get into. It's been so long since I enjoyed reading (and I really like swords). I loved: Every book by Joe Abercrombie (except Best Served Cold), which I was put on to by clever peeps in this thread. I even liked what he wrote in my copy of Sharp Ends! Discworld (specifically - Mort, Jingo, Night Watch, Monstrous Regiment, Going Postal) I liked: ASOIAF Lies of Locke Lamora (thanks for that one, thread!) The Last Wish (Witcher) Common recs I did not like: Name Of The Wind Way Of Kings Black Company The Red Knight The Gunslinger (Dark Tower) Additionally: Malazan scares me. Wheel Of Time seems like a lot of what I hate in the genre, but I also know I should try it one day because it's such A Thing. Mistborn didn't hook me, but I should give it a fair chance one day. Prince of Thorns puts me off because I just don't want to read about a character that unlikeable. Basically: I like punchy prose that doesn't waste time, I prefer more low fantasy military/historical vibes over mystical or magical (would totally be up to branching into historical fiction). And I never realised until now how much of a factor humour played in what I like (see: Pratchett, Abercrombie, Locke Lamora...). It really is key to making characters likeable, making the journey enjoyable, and balancing out all the morally grey grimdark. For what it's worth I was thinking I should check out Sword of Destiny in the Witcher series (someone in the thread told me to go with that one before Blood of Elves) at some point, and read more Pratchett (the next adventure of Moist probably). VagueRant fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 15:01
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