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I also happen to have just finished A Wizard of Earthsea and I feel like I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I'd read it when I was younger. It was definitely well-written, and I really liked the Taoist sensibilities that she worked into the magic and plot, but something about the style and/or the pacing just didn't totally hook me for some reason. I'm on my library's waitlist for The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed and I'm definitely curious how different Le Guin's style is for those since Wizard didn't really suit my current tastes. (I've also somehow never read Le Guin before now which is why I just reserved a bunch of random titles, so I'm pretty unfamiliar with her style in general at the moment.)
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Oct 5, 2020 03:22
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Sock The Great posted:It’s been years since I read it too. If I recall correctly somehow The Vatican is the leading science institute in the world. I finished it a month or so ago. The Vatican isn't a scientific institute in the book, specifically -- they just know a lot of people are able to pull some strings to put a scientific expedition together faster than anyone else once they receive the signal. They stack the mission with a handful of other Jesuit priests in addition to the secular scientist characters since it's pretty common for Jesuits to also be academics. I liked the book a lot (even not being religious myself) but I would agree that you need to sort of divorce the fictionalized/idealized version of the Catholic Church/priests in the story from the version we actually have for it to fully work.
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May 6, 2022 02:42
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Cythereal posted:The Unbroken, by C. L. Clark. I read the sequel recently, and I think that the writing definitely improved between the books, and I can see the author continuing to get better in the third. There is definitely still some character juggling though. And while there is a little more magic, I think that it's better integrated into the plot. All that to say, I thought the second book was actually better than the first which can be rare for a trilogy, especially a debut one.
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Apr 29, 2023 01:30
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Good-Natured Filth posted:Is it easy to know if an author is using a pen name? I'm worried now that I've been misattributing authorship if it's a common occurrence. Seems like twitter is pretty well broken these days, but I know a lot of authors would mention aliases/pseudonyms in their bios. But sometimes you'll find them in their author blurbs, or the "Books also by..." section in the actual books. Some also choose to keep their alias personas very separate/secret for various reasons (like Stephen King secretly being Richard Bachman [including a fake author photo and bio] and no one admitting it until a bookstore clerk figured it out and published an interview with King about it). So I wouldn't worry too much about it if an alias isn't super obvious.
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Jul 2, 2023 13:43
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This only really works with perfect bound paperbacks, but if flipping to endnotes is a chore for whatever reason, take a utility knife and cut them off through the spine so you have 2 books. One of the professors at my grad school told all their students they might want to do it with their Infinite Jest copies and they all said it made it way easier to read. (Obviously only do this with a copy you own and don't care that much if it gets messed up. But it's just a mass market paperback, and if it's something like House of Leaves it's not hard to find a cheap used copy you can slice and dice.)
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Jul 10, 2023 12:46
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I mostly loved Piranesi, but I definitely preferred the early parts just describing The House, before the mystery plot really got rolling. I also just really like stories where somebody explores a big weird place, though.
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Jul 28, 2023 02:50
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disposablewords posted:Translation State, by Ann Leckie. Literally just finished. A follow-up to her "Imperial Radch" trilogy (Ancillary Justice, Sword, and Mercy), set outside the Radch a few years on. I've really enjoyed Leckie's stuff so far, but this was a weird mix of really engaging and yet... kind of underwhelming to me. It doesn't have the same meditative yet angry and blunt mood the Radch trilogy has through its protagonist Breq, and so lacks some of the more evocative imagery we'd get through Breq's recollections and her fiercely opinionated views. A lot of its issues also, I think, come from having three rotating perspective characters. None of them really feels like they get quite enough time to really develop properly, meaning what development we do get is a bit disjointed. One of them really could have just been demoted to a secondary character, allowing things to focus more on the other two. I still really enjoyed it, and the book never left my side until I finished it just now. But it's just not Leckie's strongest work. I also just finished it! I do agree with a lot of this. I thought the middle third especially dragged until the surprising thing happened that kicked off the last act--that middle bit at least could have probably been a bit shorter or quicker to get to the big setpiece finale. I don't know if you also read Provenance (which was the Radch spinoff before this), but it also felt a lot different from the first three books (though more similar to Translation State than not) and focused a lot more on individuals and politics and only zoomed out to bigger problems/action sequences at the end, but I did end up still enjoying it, too. The way that Provenance and Translation State seem to be working together as spinoffs/sequels (specifically with having some crossover characters/referenced past events that all impact the Treaty), I'm starting to think (and hope) that Leckie is setting up something really big to happen with the Presger and all the other civilizations we've seen so far in another book or two. She seems really interested in exploring sort of "what happens next." Like you could almost take Ancillary Justice by itself and not read anything else and be satisfied with the revenge ending it has, but the following four books have all been going further and further into the ramifications of what happened in AJ, and just how many ways past events (including ones outside the Radch) impact future ones. I'm definitely interested to see where it goes.
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Aug 6, 2023 20:41
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Slugworth posted:Out of curiosity, what are everyone's reading habits? I ask because I feel like I read a reasonable amount (half an hourish a day), but I keep running up against the library's return date on every book I take out. I started wondering if I had slowed down over the past few years of very little reading, but some online reading tests suggest I still read pretty well over the average speed. Looking at usage stats for just my Kindle app, I read between 1-2 hours with it a day on average, and as far as I can tell my reading speed is on the slightly slower side of average usually. Just spitballing and going off of memory, but it seems like a typical 300-400 page book can take between 7-10 hours for the average reader (I'm just going off of the kindle average stats it will display -- I know I usually read a little slower than that). So if you do have a 10-hour book and you're only putting in a half hour a day, you'd definitely run out your library loan if it's 2 weeks (I assume that's still typical?). I will also say, that 1-2+ hours is spread through the day usually. I'll maybe read a bit when I wake up or before work, some during lunch, some after work, and I'll squeeze in a bit during work too if it's a slow day. They might each be just 10-20 minute snatches, but they add up. (I typically have both a physical book and an audiobook going, too, that wouldn't be included in that kindle usage count (not necessarily reading those with the same regularity as the ebooks, though) and at least this year I've averaged about 10 books a month -- but I do read some shorter things like manga and novellas that are included in that number.)
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Aug 31, 2023 03:38
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I do think Moreau is interesting and it stuck with me a lot more than Time Machine. Though it's largely because of the (thankfully) mostly lost chunk of context that he wrote it in large part to just say "Hey, Vivisection is Kinda hosed Up." For my most recent finish, it was The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Akatsuji. This is written in the vein of the sort of 'golden age' of detective fiction where the main goal is that it's technically possible for the reader to figure out the solution to the crime-puzzle with the clues given in the text. In Japan, there's a pretty rich tradition of this style of puzzle-box story and the genre gets called Honkaku or Shin Honkaku. They've only just started being translated to English fairly recently, apparently, and I'm interested to check out some more of them! The story itself is a kind of locked-room mystery explicitly mirroring Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None." A group of college mystery book club students goes on a retreat to a desolate island where a quadruple murder--suicide happened only six months earlier. And they start getting murdered of course. There are also a few characters back on the mainland who are trying to figure out some mysteries tied in to the island. I haven't read a ton of this style of detective fiction myself (mostly just some Christie and a couple Sherlock Holmes stories I guess?) but I had fun trying to figure out the puzzle and kept second-guessing what the red herrings were. Some aspects might come off a little twee (all the mystery club kids use nicknames based on famous European mystery writers, for example) and the characters are constantly referencing the fact that they read mystery books, but overall I think it's worth checking out if you like classic detective fiction.
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Oct 5, 2023 03:17
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Bilirubin posted:I wonder if this is a literary effect of the fact she is still young and new at her craft, and that the books will grow in complexity as they go on, or if it is a feature of the genre, which, fair enough. The other books open up a lot and have a good amount of chapters that follow other characters and are not focused on Baru's POV at all. They are stylistically different for sure - I'd definitely say at least give the next one a shot! I would also say most fantasy (that I've read at least) rarely focuses on just a single character. Multiple POV characters is pretty common these days, especially after Game of Thrones did it and popped off (or at least that's the explanation I hear a lot).
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Jan 28, 2024 14:56
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Trainee PornStar posted:After finishing Between Two Fires I was after more of the same. Hollow by Brian Catling is really close to it too.
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Mar 3, 2024 19:53
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Monica Bellucci posted:In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. The book is great, the movie is almost impressively terrible for anyone curious, not just for the wild liberties it takes (like having the ship catch fire and low key explode when it actually took several days to fully sink) but that definitely contributes.
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May 5, 2024 21:59
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