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Gaius Marius posted:You shouldn't read anything that uses Hashtag Blessed unironically, or ironically. And you shouldn't trust any reviewer invoking Kendrick in their reviews of novels. Indeed, how could current media possibly be relevant to stuff we read.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:59
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It's shameless, trying to hitch a literature to a much more popular and at this point more interesting art. Kendrick doesn't deserve that even for one of his lesser albums.
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Dec 12, 2023 00:04
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Gaius Marius posted:You shouldn't read anything that uses Hashtag Blessed unironically, or ironically. And you shouldn't trust any reviewer invoking Kendrick in their reviews of novels. I know the translator secondhand and she is insanely smart, I am interested in her choices.
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Dec 12, 2023 00:29
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General Battuta posted:I know the translator secondhand and she is insanely smart, I am interested in her choices. Her commentary is fantastic, and so is the ending. He rode hard! He stayed thirsty! He was the man! He was the man.
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Dec 12, 2023 00:32
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I liked her The Mere Wife and found it good and thoughtful but having read bits of this translation, it just comes off like a bad Hamilton-inspired skit. Or like an article on The Toast, back when that was a thing, stretched to a whole book.
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Dec 12, 2023 00:38
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I would love to see this sort of take on Shakespeare. I bet I would like his work a lot more if it were in a language I actually speak (and it was certainly meant to be accessible; it's plausible Beowulf was supposed to be stuffy).
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Dec 12, 2023 01:24
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OddObserver posted:I would love to see this sort of take on Shakespeare. I bet I would like his work a lot more if it were in a language I actually speak (and it was certainly meant to be accessible; it's plausible Beowulf was supposed to be stuffy). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEzskNtFnIY I'm only half joking, because it's excellent.
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Dec 12, 2023 01:29
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Sad to see this. I really enjoyed his work
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Dec 12, 2023 01:35
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I read that Beowulf translation to my kids, I love it. It just sounds so good out loud. The Seamus Heaney one is also great and the first way I experienced Beowulf, but you can just do what I do and own both. Or more if you want. Lots of choices.
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Dec 12, 2023 02:13
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reported
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Dec 12, 2023 02:16
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is that loss?
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Dec 12, 2023 02:17
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Jordan7hm posted:I read that Beowulf translation to my kids, I love it. It just sounds so good out loud. Yeah, again I'll stan for the audiobook edition. It just sounds fantastic when spoken aloud.
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Dec 12, 2023 03:22
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habeasdorkus posted:Yeah, again I'll stan for the audiobook edition. It just sounds fantastic when spoken aloud. Same goes for Shakespeare. It’s kinda blah on the page but get it out loud and it slaps, even if the text remains unmodified.
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Dec 12, 2023 03:24
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Yeah, a good performance of a Shakespeare play will keep you riveted.
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Dec 12, 2023 03:27
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Oh hey, the first copies of Battuta's new Exordia are out! Quoting a twitter user, "This is a very different book than Baru, but Seth’s evocative prose and dark humor is familiar from page one, and the laser focus on defamiliarizing real world injustices is again the core of the work."
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Dec 12, 2023 04:00
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Bilirubin posted:is that loss? So is the cover of her last, Nona the Ninth, and I am not making this up. I can't find the Tor tweet that has the cover with the lines drawn to prove it, but it's true.
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Dec 12, 2023 04:17
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Kalman posted:Same goes for Shakespeare. It’s kinda blah on the page but get it out loud and it slaps, even if the text remains unmodified. The same is true of The Silmarillion, since it was written intentionally in a style that is meant to read aloud. My journey into Nonborn King has gotten weird. The scans the publisher used to make these ebooks have been a bit wonky in the first two books, but the scan for book three is egregiously terrible. About half of all instances of double lower-case 'l' (all, fall, ball, etc.) get turned into 'd', for example, leading to things like "The Nightfall War" becoming "Nightfad." This is complicated even further by Julian May having an astonishing breadth of grammar. Like, we're all big nerds here, I think a fair portion of us have probably read a dictionary for pleasure at some point, but I haven't looked up words this frequently since Book of the New Sun. Between that and the bad scan, sometimes you can't tell if she's using a word you've never heard of it, or if it's merely a somewhat obscure word that's been mutilated by a scan, or if it's an extremely obscure word that has also been mutilated by the scan to the point where looking it up is nearly impossible. That said, the series continues to please. The "third season of an anime" power creep is extremely real and it's all to the good. Beautiful descriptions of things, distinctive personalities, and wild psychic manifestations are May's strong points, and we're getting more of those and less bizarre cringey slang dialogue.
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Dec 12, 2023 04:18
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I’m about 100 pages into Gideon the Ninth and I enjoy the authorial voice and, in theory, the central relationship, but the plot is moving incredibly slow for me. Very little has happened and nothing terribly interesting is going on thematically—I’m just hanging on because I do think Muir is witty and a good writer on a sentence by sentence basis. Should I keep going on or is this just not the book for me?
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Dec 12, 2023 04:31
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Doubleposting to pour one out for David Drake, whose body of work I am shamefully ill-acquainted with, but whose Lord of the Isles I greatly enjoyed as a young person, and which led directly to my finding Earthsea. I was intending to read Hammer's Slammers at some point, but after seeing this I might have to change things up a bit: https://twitter.com/kennethhite/status/1734086455750795597 ... go on. Edit: nemesis_hub posted:I’m about 100 pages into Gideon the Ninth and I enjoy the authorial voice and, in theory, the central relationship, but the plot is moving incredibly slow for me. Very little has happened and nothing terribly interesting is going on thematically—I’m just hanging on because I do think Muir is witty and a good writer on a sentence by sentence basis. I read it on audio so I'm not 100% sure on page counts, but I think you're about at the point where the setup is wrapping up and things start moving.
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Dec 12, 2023 04:32
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Now have read Harrow the Ninth. Sorry for the long and spoiler-bar-heavy post. I enjoyed this a lot, even more than the first (which I really did enjoy, various nitpicks notwithstanding). It does a good job feeling totally different from the first while still delivering a similarly structured story (it's mostly different necromancers in a different haunted house, to borrow someone upthread's description of the first book). I thought the writing was even better this time out, which is kind of unusual since a lot of debut authors spend years on the debut and then get deadline crunched on the sequel. A lot less distractingly contemporary than the first book and just more serious overall, which for me was a big improvement (though maybe not realistic given Gideon is "writing" most of it? Also boy is the dad joke obnoxious here in a way it wouldn't have been in the previous book, ugh) This time it's overtly a puzzle box, a very well done puzzle box so far (sequels pending), and those are basically my favorite kind of story. I liked that even on a first read I had the chance to infer things before they were revealed (Ortus the First's real name and how it was being obscured by the search/replace, for instance, or the way the second person narration correctly identifies a sword's pommel, suggesting it was Gideon). Really glad I read this right after the first one. If I had read this when it first came out, I would have been stuck doing my A-AB-ABC-ABCD permuted reading of the series like I did for Terra Ignota. I really loved the ambiguity of the ending. The Emperor seemed so laid back and chill, I assumed he would turn out to be a monster, but from what is revealed so far the ethics of killing him are very dubious given the collateral damage (pending further reveals, sure) The whole AU scenes of the previous book thing is very, very anime and the justifying magic-babble wasn't very convincing but there's a reason anime does it, it was fun the get more time with the underused characters (especially since the lyctor characters weren't as fun to be around) Gene Wolfe influence watch: stronger but still mild (identity games but--amazingly--no one has died without realizing it? Nonius and the Sleeper getting warped by poetry is starting to get there, but--so far--I don't think anyone has started accidentally becoming the thing they are pretending to be) Three relatively minor nitpicks that many, many books also fall into but are pet peeves of mine:
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Dec 12, 2023 04:40
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As for my inflammatory statement earlier about death and loss, I should have expressed myself better. First, I was just talking based on Gideon the Ninth, obviously, and not the sequels. I do appreciate that Harrow the Ninth pays a lot more attention to death and loss both in big ways and in some smaller ways and that Gideon the Ninth was obviously written to set these up, so I'm sorry I said anything about the author. That was dumb. But the underlying feeling I was trying and failing to talk about before is still there for me, so at the risk of further angering people, let me try one more time. As I've gotten older I've become just a tiny bit uncomfortable with the way, to take a famous example, Star Wars has a bunch of pilot extras get killed to amp up the tension and therefore the heroism of its lead character and then, well, literally leaves them for dead and never bothers to mention they existed. Even the old EU novels mostly couldn't muster much empathy for those pilots, they were too busy getting more extras in position to get dramatically killed around the protagonists. Like other nitpicks in my last post, this is something tons of fiction does so it's silly to hold it against anyone, but since Gideon the Ninth felt like it was using necromancy for plot twists and window dressing, I thought about it more than usual. I haven't (but I'm sure someone on the Internet has) counted how many skeletons--remains of a human being who lived and loved and feared and died--are conjured in the book only to get crushed, broken, obliterated, or just abandoned a few seconds later. Hundreds? Maybe a thousand? Several of you pointed out the cavalier handling of these things makes sense given the setting and yes, I totally believe that Harrow doesn't give two shits about these skeletons, who they were, and what their death and their extremely short and usually dumb resurrection means, if anything. But I don't live in that world, I live in this one. And look, I really enjoyed the book, so I guess I don't really give two shits about all these dead extras either. But I kind of wish I did.
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Dec 12, 2023 04:41
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Lex Talionis posted:the cavalier handling of these things (I also didn't notice I posted them into the wrong thread, gah)
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Dec 12, 2023 04:41
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As to the age of characters in the Locked Tomb vs their behavior, I've often felt if someone doesn't age physically and the amount of responsibility they have stays basically the same, it would be possible to go hundreds of years without growing in any meaningful way. Especially if you're constantly hanging around the same group of people and the chemical processes and hormones inside your body aren't changing the way they normally do when people age.
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Dec 12, 2023 04:50
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Yeah, I think the Locked Tomb's take on really, really old characters is that they've all pretty much stopped developing as people, in large part because they don't really associate with anybody except each other. The exception is Gideon the First, who has changed in ways nobody really appreciates, because he's got a secret romance with somebody outside the Lyctor circle.
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Dec 12, 2023 05:05
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You should read Nona then join us in https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3937069
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Dec 12, 2023 05:14
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Lex Talionis posted:As I've gotten older I've become just a tiny bit uncomfortable with the way, to take a famous example, Star Wars has a bunch of pilot extras get killed to amp up the tension and therefore the heroism of its lead character and then, well, literally leaves them for dead and never bothers to mention they existed. Even the old EU novels mostly couldn't muster much empathy for those pilots, they were too busy getting more extras in position to get dramatically killed around the protagonists. Yeah, it's for that reason that I was never able to see the movie as having a truly happy ending. I found a similar experience in No Country for Old Men - in the movie, Chigurh kills a lot of people who are never mentioned or thought of again, where in the book the Sheriff checks up on the crime scenes, talks to horrified locals and coworkers and relatives, and is disheartened by the loss. Made the two iterations of the almost-identical story feel rather different in how they handle death.
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Dec 12, 2023 05:58
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https://gizmodo.com/cait-corrain-crown-of-starlight-controversy-explainer-1851090312 New author manages to nuke her career from orbit before her first book is even released! That's gotta be a record somehow...
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Dec 12, 2023 06:12
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Lex Talionis posted:As for my inflammatory statement earlier about death and loss, I should have expressed myself better. First, I was just talking based on Gideon the Ninth, obviously, and not the sequels. I do appreciate that Harrow the Ninth pays a lot more attention to death and loss both in big ways and in some smaller ways and that Gideon the Ninth was obviously written to set these up, so I'm sorry I said anything about the author. That was dumb. But the underlying feeling I was trying and failing to talk about before is still there for me, so at the risk of further angering people, let me try one more time. I get what you're saying here, and tend to agree, especially wrt Gideon. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the next book, Nona, is a ground-level view of what living in a necromatic empire, specifically on a war-torn world, is like, and so touches on these issues a bit more. If you're looking for a book that delves into the morality and responsibilities of necromancy, I'd recommend Saint Death's Daughter. It's about Lanie, a young necromancer who's kindhearted to the point of being physically allergic to violence. She's from a long line of evil assassins and necromancers, and so has to forge her own path as she grows into her power. No life, not even that of a mouse, is too small for her to care about. Unfortunately, her family's business means that she had a lot of enemies and, even worse, people who want to use her abilities for less than savory purposes. The book's tone is light and hopeful, like Lanie, though some pretty dark stuff happens throughout. It's not perfect- the middle slows down quite a bit- but I found the characters fun enough to spend time with that I didn't mind.
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Dec 12, 2023 06:26
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:https://gizmodo.com/cait-corrain-crown-of-starlight-controversy-explainer-1851090312 It probably happens more often than you think, but the toxic people don't get as far as a publication announcement before torpedoing themselves.
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Dec 12, 2023 09:17
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FPyat posted:Oh hey, the first copies of Battuta's new Exordia are out! Quoting a twitter user, "This is a very different book than Baru, but Seth’s evocative prose and dark humor is familiar from page one, and the laser focus on defamiliarizing real world injustices is again the core of the work." I've got an ARC via NetGalley and it's just constantly blowing my mind -- just awe-inspiring. Unless it falls to bits in the last half, it's going to the top of my favorites shelf.
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Dec 12, 2023 12:07
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My Shark Waifuu posted:I get what you're saying here, and tend to agree, especially wrt Gideon. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the next book, Nona, is a ground-level view of what living in a necromatic empire, specifically on a war-torn world, is like, and so touches on these issues a bit more. I quite enjoyed SDD, and want to second this post. And the naming in it is *hilarious*.
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Dec 12, 2023 13:02
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:https://gizmodo.com/cait-corrain-crown-of-starlight-controversy-explainer-1851090312
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Dec 12, 2023 13:55
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Lex Talionis posted:As for my inflammatory statement earlier about death and loss, I should have expressed myself better. First, I was just talking based on Gideon the Ninth, obviously, and not the sequels. I do appreciate that Harrow the Ninth pays a lot more attention to death and loss both in big ways and in some smaller ways and that Gideon the Ninth was obviously written to set these up, so I'm sorry I said anything about the author. That was dumb. But the underlying feeling I was trying and failing to talk about before is still there for me, so at the risk of further angering people, let me try one more time. okay I forget if people already recommended but you should check out The March North by Graydon Saunders because it's one of the very few books I've read where this doesn't happen, lots of people die but the effects of it are front and center in both the plot and characterization of the survivors.
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Dec 12, 2023 15:16
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Benagain posted:okay I forget if people already recommended but you should check out The March North by Graydon Saunders because it's one of the very few books I've read where this doesn't happen, lots of people die but the effects of it are front and center in both the plot and characterization of the survivors. Huh, of all the many compelling things I've said to interest me in my book, that one might be the strongest. I should really get off my rear end and get my hands on my novel. Thanks, Graydon!
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Dec 12, 2023 15:41
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Lex Talionis posted:
I kinda feel like this is also a deliberate theme of the series. It gets explored more in Nona, and I kinda expect some sort of denouement in Alecto. And, well, the number is quite a few orders of magnitude higher than "a thousand".
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Dec 12, 2023 16:03
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Lex Talionis posted:Like other nitpicks in my last post, this is something tons of fiction does so it's silly to hold it against anyone, but since Gideon the Ninth felt like it was using necromancy for plot twists and window dressing, I thought about it more than usual. I haven't (but I'm sure someone on the Internet has) counted how many skeletons--remains of a human being who lived and loved and feared and died--are conjured in the book only to get crushed, broken, obliterated, or just abandoned a few seconds later. Hundreds? Maybe a thousand? Several of you pointed out the cavalier handling of these things makes sense given the setting and yes, I totally believe that Harrow doesn't give two shits about these skeletons, who they were, and what their death and their extremely short and usually dumb resurrection means, if anything. But I don't live in that world, I live in this one. And look, I really enjoyed the book, so I guess I don't really give two shits about all these dead extras either. But I kind of wish I did. If it makes you feel better, you can go back and look at the descriptions of the skeletons being conjured and animated and realize that Harrow is constructing whole-rear end squads of skeleton enforcers out of like, a tiny bone she wears in her earring. She's not packing around whole family mausoleums in a traveling trunk or really animating the corpses of people for most of it.
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Dec 12, 2023 16:22
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Lex Talionis posted:I really loved the ambiguity of the ending. The Emperor seemed so laid back and chill, I assumed he would turn out to be a monster, but from what is revealed so far the ethics of killing him are very dubious given the collateral damage (pending further reveals, sure) Alright you are required to read book 3 and join us in the locked tomb thread. I don't make the rules
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Dec 12, 2023 16:37
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Olesh posted:If it makes you feel better, you can go back and look at the descriptions of the skeletons being conjured and animated and realize that Harrow is constructing whole-rear end squads of skeleton enforcers out of like, a tiny bone she wears in her earring. She's not packing around whole family mausoleums in a traveling trunk or really animating the corpses of people for most of it. I was gonna say that too but to be fair there are also tons of people skeletons everywhere, including all the servants in the first house and the uh, decorative heroic memorials in the emperor's space station. General Battuta posted:Huh, of all the many compelling things I've said to interest me in my book, that one might be the strongest. I should really get off my rear end and get my hands on my novel. Thanks, Graydon! Reading this made me briefly feel like I was having a stroke lol (to be clear for everyone after some drama when a bunch of people recommended it and one guy got pissed there's an ongoing joke that anyone recommending Graydon Saunders books is a sockpuppet for the author. )
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Dec 12, 2023 16:52
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Can anyone recommend a book to me that's has a plausible but fun exploration of alien life in it? I was thinking Children of Time (not actually aliens, I know) but how propulsive is it? Is it quite a slow read? Also, anything where aliens learn of and interact with our world?
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Dec 12, 2023 17:00
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Children of Time is perfect.
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