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Just finished Fiend by Peter Stenson. A twist on a zombie apocalypse told from the point of view of a meth head. It was a total blast to read and I didn't put it down since I bought it.
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Oct 24, 2013 01:23
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Night Watch by Terry Pratchett Sam Vimes mentors himself while being the best riot cop ever and tossing molotovs. Darker than a lot of Diskworld and a very good read.
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Oct 24, 2013 19:21
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Man, I like big 'pretentious' books, but I just couldn't stand the part of Infinite Jest that I managed to get through. Didn't find it funny, hated the prose, found all the characters weird and alienating, deepened my already considerable loathing of tennis. I'll have to go back to it one day because so many people liked it that I think the fault must be with me and I'm absolutely determined to discover something in it. Yeah, I've been reading some more Delany after reading Dhalgren, which I loved. So far, I've had the same reaction you did, the books just... don't really go anywhere, veer into DID I MENTION SEX IN THE PAST 10 PAGES? NO? HERE THEN territory way too much. I'm not ready to give up, I'm sure he has something else on par with Dhalgren, but I'm not sure what it is yet.
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Oct 24, 2013 22:02
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What's that Samuel Delany (non-sf) book where a teenager just has oodles of gay sex with homeless dudes and gets turned on by the smell of piss and the gaps in their teeth?
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Oct 24, 2013 23:17
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We Danced All Night (Barbara Cartland): Cartland has written a ton of fiction, but this is one of her memoirs, one of posh society in the 1920s. It's an overload of upper class social doings, from theatre and films to parties to the Bright Young Things. Cartland flits from story to story and occasionally just ticks off a list of happenings, but she can tell a story. The Bright Young Things parts are insane. Equally fascinating are when she dips into social customs and mores as they evolved from Edwardian times. It's a wonderful history, but it definitely works best if you're at least familiar with upper class names. Winston Churchill and the Prince of Wales are frequently mentioned, but most of the stories and the best ones are about other folks. There's lots, for example, on the Ednams, Curzons, Coopers and Lord Beaverbrook.
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Oct 25, 2013 07:15
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:Man, I like big 'pretentious' books, but I just couldn't stand the part of Infinite Jest that I managed to get through. Didn't find it funny, hated the prose, found all the characters weird and alienating, deepened my already considerable loathing of tennis. I'll have to go back to it one day because so many people liked it that I think the fault must be with me and I'm absolutely determined to discover something in it. It was meant to be the first half of a series, but IIRC he didn't finish it because it was meant to be a tribute to NYC gay culture and it was published about the time AIDS became visible, and he couldn't bring himself to finish it. Maybe you'd prefer his late 60s stuff (The Einstein Intersection to Nova)?
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Oct 25, 2013 10:01
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Hedrigall posted:What's that Samuel Delany (non-sf) book where a teenager just has oodles of gay sex with homeless dudes and gets turned on by the smell of piss and the gaps in their teeth? All of them  House Louse posted:It was meant to be the first half of a series, but IIRC he didn't finish it because it was meant to be a tribute to NYC gay culture and it was published about the time AIDS became visible, and he couldn't bring himself to finish it. Maybe you'd prefer his late 60s stuff (The Einstein Intersection to Nova)? That explains a lot, thanks. As a white woman I'm not exactly the target audience of a fair few of his books and I always just accept some level of 'not getting it', but Stars did feel particularly weird and incomplete. I'll check those ones out!
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Oct 25, 2013 10:27
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I've been recently on a kick of reading Ursula K. Le Guin - it started with trying to read the books by her that I had never read, but of course I've ultimately brought out my old favorites that I had not read in 10+ years and revisited them - Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Earthsea Trilogy-turned-Quartet-turned-Cycle... Earthsea in particular was worth revisiting, as despite growing up with it as a "trilogy" and adoring those books (this was pre Harry Potter, mind you, not many bildungsromans about young wizards around). So anyway, I have been re-reading them, starting from the beginning. And I am just stunned, I must say, as to how infinitely better that first book was to me now, as a 28-year-old man with some life experience, than it was to me as a 13-year-old boy where I took much of it at face value. It's actually a bit stunning, to be frank. Because I identified with the character so much back then that I used his name as my handle for a long while online. And now I see how deep that identification went, in some ways, and that is fascinating and deeply affecting to me. I couldn't sleep last night and wound up reading the bulk of The Tombs of Atuan, the second book of the original Earthsea Trilogy, and originally a sort of "black sheep" in the trilogy, in that it did not focus on the magnetic male hero of the first book, Ged/Sparrowhawk, but on a young girl who is priestess of a strange religion in a lonely tomb where only women and eunuchs are allowed. Ged, the hero, does not show up till halfway through and really plays a supporting role. I absolutely did not understand this book at all when I had read it last before; I must have been 15 then. But it made me weep openly last night on several occasions, and I was deeply moved by many, many different aspects of it this time around. I am a bit chagrined at how little credit I gave it when I read it as a young teen. I suppose I could not identify with the protagonist at all, and thus could not see the book for what it was. But boy. I not only identified with the protagonist this time, but I was just awed by the sheer power of the book. THIS is how you write a High Fantasy novel. I couldn't help but think a little of George R. R. Martin, and how incredibly different Ursula K. Le Guin's style of fantasy is when compared to his. I mean no disrespect to GRRM, but... I can't help but compare since I was reading his fantasy-writing last, and by comparison his style seems horrifically bloated and I simply feel like he could take a TON of tips from her. Tombs of Atuan is a sparsely written book that clocks in at maybe 175 pages, but what she does with those 175 pages is pretty stunning. She simply manages to say so much by saying so little, and hers is the sort of writing where you might ponder and re-read a particular passage or scene a dozen times before moving on. Because there is just so much going on in this world that she has created, between the pages and lines. It practically teems with a life of its own. I have no clue how she manages to pull this off, or write the way she does. I find it stunning. In any case, I shall continue in my re-read, but I don't know if I will run into another surprise like this. The Farthest Shore is next, and while I remember it being the greatest of the Earthsea books, I have also read it more than the others - I happened to retain a copy of it that's been rattling around for years, so while I never got to re-read the others, I did re-read that one on occasion. It may surprise me, though; who knows. edit: I may make an Ursula K. Le Guin/Earthsea Cycle/Hainish Cycle megathread. Probably just an Ursula megathread. Is this a reasonable idea? I think she is certainly worthy of it, having an extremely long, prolific, and almost unbelievably influential career over the last 50 years. She's probably the greatest living sci-fi/fantasy writer of her generation, still going strong at around 85 years old, I believe. kaworu fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Oct 26, 2013 |
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Oct 26, 2013 16:47
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I read the Earthsea books for the first time this month and I think The Tombs of Atuan ended up being my favourite. I really should have a go at her other books I guess!
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Oct 26, 2013 17:02
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Nettle Soup posted:I read the Earthsea books for the first time this month and I think The Tombs of Atuan ended up being my favourite. I really should have a go at her other books I guess! The Lathe of Heaven is one of my favorite books, period.
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Oct 26, 2013 17:20
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Nettle Soup posted:I read the Earthsea books for the first time this month and I think The Tombs of Atuan ended up being my favourite. I really should have a go at her other books I guess! Yeah, Lathe of Heaven is a wonderful, imaginative, amazing mind-bending sci-fi novel in the vein of Philip K. Dick. In fact, Le Guin was very explicit about the novel being something of a tribute/homage to PK Dick, and you can really tell while reading that this is so. It's a little different than most of her writing because of this, in my opinion. Personally though, I would recommend The Left Hand of Darkness. I think it is easily the best single novel she ever wrote, and just stunning, amazing stuff. kaworu fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Oct 26, 2013 |
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Oct 26, 2013 17:35
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As a huge PK Dick fan and someone looking for more books to read, is Lathe something I can pick up and read without knowing Earthsea, or do I need to read them in order?
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Oct 27, 2013 14:32
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ProfessorProf posted:As a huge PK Dick fan and someone looking for more books to read, is Lathe something I can pick up and read without knowing Earthsea, or do I need to read them in order? LoH is a standalone novel, go for it. Her other stuff, while often excellent, has little to do with PKD. For other PKD-like recommendations, check out Blueprints of the Afterlife and David Marusek's stuff.
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Oct 27, 2013 14:38
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ProfessorProf posted:As a huge PK Dick fan and someone looking for more books to read, is Lathe something I can pick up and read without knowing Earthsea, or do I need to read them in order? Yeah, you really do not need to worry about this at all with the exception of her 5 Earthsea novels. The Hainish cycle can be read in any order, since they are more a loose collection of novels that exist within the same general sci-fi mythology. Lathe is outside all of these and somewhat rather set apart from her work in a number of ways. It truly is like a Dick novel in every way - it uses his stock female character to some extent, has a Beatles song as a centrally important part of the plot, deals with many alternate forms of reality and the inherent subjectivity of the universe, as well as drug abuse. Takes place in an alternate future set in 2002 much like our own but slightly dystopian with small differences, again like many Dick novels. Something very amusing I found out was that Le Guin and Dick were in the same graduating class (1947) at Berkeley High School in CA. Though, they didn't know one another. Amazing coincidence. edit: There is a great quote from Dick on the wikipedia page for Lathe of Heaven: Philip K. Dick posted:"One of the best novels, and most important to understanding of the nature of our world, is Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, in which the dream universe is articulated in such a striking and compelling way that I hesitate to add any further explanation to it; it requires none." kaworu fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Oct 27, 2013 |
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Oct 27, 2013 15:02
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kaworu posted:I may make an Ursula K. Le Guin/Earthsea Cycle/Hainish Cycle megathread. Probably just an Ursula megathread. Is this a reasonable idea? I think she is certainly worthy of it, having an extremely long, prolific, and almost unbelievably influential career over the last 50 years. She's probably the greatest living sci-fi/fantasy writer of her generation, still going strong at around 85 years old, I believe. Hell, yes. Le Guin sometimes gets disparaged and is often ignored, but in almost every novel she's stretching the genre and experimenting, reaching for some point. Your comparison with GRRM is apropos: I'm unconvinced he's written anything more than potboilers or airport lounge fiction (as satisfying as they may be), while it's incredible to look at Earthsea and how Le Guin developed the series and worked outside the usual white / cod-medieval / wizards cliches of fantasy.
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Oct 28, 2013 09:57
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In the past week I've read, all for the first time, Ender's Game, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe, and Everything. They have all been amazing. I love Douglas Adams' humor, and enjoyed how the books became more story driven as they went along. Ender's Game was also a fantastic read, and at the climax I was all  . Now to start So Long and Thanks for all the Fish!
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Oct 28, 2013 13:32
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"The Oxford English Dictionary is greatest work of reference ever written, and its largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American."* My boy Forsyth knocks it out of the park again in 'The Etymologicon', which covers the fascinating and often convoluted origins of selected English words and phrases. There are lots of interesting detours into history, ancient cultures/customs, as well as linguistics. (Also the book is funny.) Highly recommended to word nerds, check your local library. *William Minor: -Was a Union doctor in the Civil War who had to brand deserters with a big "D" on their faces. -Got transferred from New York to Florida after the war for being involved with too many prostitutes. -Went full-on crazy, was discharged, and moved to England to recover... -... where he became paranoid that former brandees were plotting to kill him. -So he pre-emptively murdered an Irishman who as it turned out, didn't have a "D" branded on his face. -This got him locked up in a looney bin, where he had ample time to contribute a prodigious amount of content to the OED. -He later cut off a part of his male anatomy (a practice known as "autopeotomy") for reasons. -Not even making any of this up, seriously this book is very entertaining, well-written, and interesting as hell, as is his other one, The Horologicon.
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Oct 28, 2013 13:49
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Just finished up Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch. I have really enjoyed all three GB books so far, his world is more appealing to me than a lot of the fantasy I've read over the last decade. Starting in on Jim Butcher's Death Masks as I haven't read any Dresden novels in a while, I definitely agree with the sentiment that they get a bit better after the first few. I had a few credits on audible so I grabbed the audiobooks of this and the next two as well. I can generally get about 3 hours of listening in while I'm at work and then pick it up on my kindle when I'm at home. It's my first time listening to any of the Dresden Files audiobooks, and I have to say that James Marsters does indeed live up to the hype I'd heard about him. He's probably tied for my favorite narrator now.
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Oct 28, 2013 21:23
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TraderStav posted:I just finished The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett. Very good apocalyptic fantasy that finds the right balance of character development, world creation, and just plain terror. I'm not a good review writer, but I will wholeheartedly recommend this book to you. Started the sequel The Desert Spear immediately after completing it. Just finished The Warded Man as well, on this recommendation. A bit on the 'teen lit' side of things and kinda had a Hunger Games vibe to it mixed with a thorough (read: long) character setup. It read like a really well-done Dungeons and Dragons group meeting up for the first time. Good with great world-building and a page-turner, but not great - reading The Desert Spear next as well anyway.
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Oct 29, 2013 01:41
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I'm in the middle of reading a different book for pleasure, but last weekend I was assigned to read The Quiet American by Graham Greene for a class, and ended up loving it. It's as if you crossed a film noir/hardboiled detective story with a war story; the setting, Vietnam in the mid-fifties, is really vividly realized as well. I highly recommend it- it's a great example of how the conventions of "genre" fiction can be utilized in an artful way.
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Oct 29, 2013 18:58
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Graham Greene is a really good writer who's super-strong on plot and characterization, especially when he's writing one of his "entertainments." The only thing that ticks me off is sometimes his analogies are a bit bullshit. I finished The Comedians a couple of days ago and it was great. Super-quick read, and pulled off balancing being compelling travel writing (being set in Papa Doc's Haiti) with some fairly heavy existentialist concerns (a niggling worry that existence is just interpretation and performance).
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Oct 29, 2013 19:08
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I finished Breakfast of Champions, what a great read!
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Oct 30, 2013 11:07
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Mr. Squishy posted:Graham Greene is a really good writer who's super-strong on plot and characterization, especially when he's writing one of his "entertainments." The only thing that ticks me off is sometimes his analogies are a bit bullshit. I finished The Comedians a couple of days ago and it was great. Super-quick read, and pulled off balancing being compelling travel writing (being set in Papa Doc's Haiti) with some fairly heavy existentialist concerns (a niggling worry that existence is just interpretation and performance). Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel. I often reach for Greene when I need quick entertainment.
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Oct 30, 2013 11:29
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2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson This book won the 2013 Nebula award and was a finalist for the Hugo award among others, and I have no loving idea why. The worldbuilding aspect was interesting and I'm a sucker for post scarcity environments, thanks in large part to some dude named Iain Banks, but the details were often bogged down in dry exposition disguised as 'excerpts' and 'lists', although the latter was often a jumble of nouns and emotions that were completely irrelevant to a good story. The plot was an uninteresting afterthought and if it wasn't for the occasional interesting depiction of celestial body formation and exploitation, the book could gently caress off entirely. 2/5 e: I loathe sci-fi authors that seemingly insert their favored hobbies into their novels (Beethoven in 2312.) Occasionally anachronistic stuff like this has its place in defining something about a character or relationship, but in this case it felt like an unnecessary homage or simple ego stroking. Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmen 2013 finalist for the Nebula and Hugo awards. This book was better but relatively direct and simplistic, with a weak climax and ending. It's a story of a small group of individuals fighting against a sorceror (or 'ghul of ghuls') who attempts to gain access to ancient power and turn the world to madness. The whole thing is utterly predictable but a reasonably decent read; I'd call it YA fiction if it weren't for some graphic depictions of torture and death. I appreciated the 'middle east' flavor of the book and wouldn't mind reading more (better) books in this type of setting. 3/5 I'm hesitant to try any of the other books on the Hugo/Nebula awards list. snooman fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Oct 30, 2013 |
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Oct 30, 2013 17:52
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snooman posted:I'm hesitant to try any of the other books on the Hugo/Nebula awards list. This year? Don't bother.
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Oct 30, 2013 18:02
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Megazver posted:This year? Don't bother. I'm looking at 2011/2012 now. Any thoughts on Jack McDevitt and China Mieville?
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Oct 30, 2013 18:15
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snooman posted:I'm looking at 2011/2012 now. Any thoughts on Jack McDevitt and China Mieville? China is a really good writer, but you should probably check out The Scar first.
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Oct 30, 2013 18:17
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snooman posted:I'm looking at 2011/2012 now. Any thoughts on Jack McDevitt and China Mieville? I agree that The Scar is the best Mieville book but it ties in to Perdido Street Station which does the original world-building and is a good book if you hang in there. For Middle East flavor, I highly recommend the Bel Dame trilogy by Kameron Hurley starting with God's War. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sandstein/Drafts/God's_War[/url]
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Oct 30, 2013 19:08
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Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. I'm still digesting it. McCarthy writes the most beguiling depictions of sorrow I think I'll ever read. There were many times when I'd finish reading a sentence or a paragraph and have to stop to spend several moments absorbing the terrible beauty of what I just read. I'd be hard pressed to say whether I prefer this or Blood Meridian. It was fantastic, absorbing, and poetic. Read it.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:20
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Austrian mook posted:I finished Breakfast of Champions, what a great read! One of my favorite Vonnegut novels.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:24
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snooman posted:I'm hesitant to try any of the other books on the Hugo/Nebula awards list. You should check out the Clarke Award list instead. The Nebula award is voted on by all current SFWA members (bleh) and the only requirement to be a Hugo award voter is a membership fee. The Clarke awards on the other hand use a panel of judges and they read all the books on the list. It might not be the best way to go, but it's probably better than going with the Hugo/Nebula lists.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:27
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snooman posted:e: I loathe sci-fi authors that seemingly insert their favored hobbies into their novels (Beethoven in 2312.) Occasionally anachronistic stuff like this has its place in defining something about a character or relationship, but in this case it felt like an unnecessary homage or simple ego stroking. Wait, what the gently caress? What's anachronistic about a character in the year 2312 enjoying Beethoven?
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Oct 31, 2013 01:59
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Hedrigall posted:Wait, what the gently caress? What's anachronistic about a character in the year 2312 enjoying Beethoven? Might be a character obsessed with the 1990s movie series about a big dog... nah, that'd still just be a very odd hobby interest, not an anachronism. (Realistically, I suppose any non-apocalyptic future will have some people going all  over very specific bits of past culture since we already have people like that and the amount of past culture available to obsess over isn't exactly shrinking.)
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Oct 31, 2013 07:12
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Groke posted:Might be a character obsessed with the 1990s movie series about a big dog... nah, that'd still just be a very odd hobby interest, not an anachronism. (Realistically, I suppose any non-apocalyptic future will have some people going all WEll, Beethoven is still a household name 200 years later, and even medieval music retains niche appeal today so it doesn't seem that far fetched to me.
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Oct 31, 2013 07:57
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Cream_Filling posted:WEll, Beethoven is still a household name 200 years later, and even medieval music retains niche appeal today so it doesn't seem that far fetched to me. Exactly. And as the documentary series "Babylon 5" showed, some future humans will for example appreciate such things as 20th century Warner Brothers cartoons, so assuming that the currently biggest names among the 18th/19th century classical composers will be forgotten seems unsafe.
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Oct 31, 2013 08:05
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snooman posted:I'm hesitant to try any of the other books on the Hugo/Nebula awards list.
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Oct 31, 2013 08:25
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Butch Cassidy posted:One of my favorite Vonnegut novels. It's great, one of my favorites as well. I love how it just sort of does whatever the gently caress, conventions be dammed!
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Oct 31, 2013 09:46
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snooman posted:I'm looking at 2011/2012 now. Any thoughts on Jack McDevitt and China Mieville? I loved Mieville's stuff. Crazy world-building with a lot of fantastical elements. The only McDevitt novel I read, (Echo nominee 2010) was a boring, meandering wreck - but it was #5 in a loose series of books that I never read, ymmv. I guess he's known more for his detective-y spin on Sci-Fi.
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Oct 31, 2013 13:19
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Srice posted:You should check out the Clarke Award list instead. The Nebula award is voted on by all current SFWA members (bleh) and the only requirement to be a Hugo award voter is a membership fee. The Clarke awards on the other hand use a panel of judges and they read all the books on the list. Thanks, I'll add that to my list. I'm basically just fishing through awards lists to find good authors that I haven't exhausted. Megazver posted:China is a really good writer, but you should probably check out The Scar first. Started reading that last night and it immediately grabbed my attention. It's probably selective memory, but British (or maybe more broadly, UK) authors seem to have such fluid prose and they always bubble to the top of my favorites. Tolkien, Clavell and Forester to name a few. Cream_Filling posted:WEll, Beethoven is still a household name 200 years later, and even medieval music retains niche appeal today so it doesn't seem that far fetched to me. I suppose 2312 isn't a particularly egregious example and in the past I enjoyed series based entirely around anachronistic or out of place references, like Ready Player One and in the distant past, the Spellsinger series from Foster and at least two of the Piers Anthony series. Scifi authors just seem to have a bad habit of inserting tuckerizations and references to their favorite hobbies in their books but there's no point in about it any more than I have.
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Oct 31, 2013 16:30
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The Collector by John Fowles I found this story about a gormless kidnapper and his beleaguered victim terribly affecting. It's superbly written and, unlike other "inside the mind of a madman" books that I've read, really takes the time to develop and flesh out its characters. Fowles delves deeply into class and background as motivators for Frederick and Miranda, eliciting a conflicting mixture of sympathy and disgust for abductor and captive alike. The result is a very engaging portrayal of complete, rounded characters that does not shy away from their faults nor make excuses for their actions. Frederick is more insipid than he is insidious, raised to have a parochial worldview, yet his unfortunate upbringing doesn't forgive the absolute tyranny he's created. Miranda, while betraying an upper-class elitism, at least possesses a self-awareness of her flaws and struggles to remain true to herself in an imposed situation that is entirely out of her control. At times maddening and other times perfectly agreeable, I found myself racing to the end to see how their stories played out. An overall well-crafted and gripping read.
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Oct 31, 2013 21:37
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