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Return of the Crimson Guard is actually a low point for Esslemont. Stonewielder and Orb Sceptre Throne are both good books. Have you read the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach book?
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Jun 10, 2013 22:18
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:IT manifests as its victims greatest fears and it makes perfect sense that for children in the 50's it would be Hammer Horror monsters, but when it's the freaking Teen Wolf and Frankenstein's monster it gets a bit silly. Hammer's biggest pictures in the period were not released in the timeframe covered by the book. The Curse of Frankenstein was 1956, while Dracula didn't hit the US until late 1958 and The Mummy was the year after. I Was A Teenage Werewolf and I Was A Teenage Frankenstein were both the back half of 1957, so it's not unreasonable that they'd be a Saturday matinee double-bill in June 1958.
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Jul 22, 2013 22:06
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escape artist posted:I just finished A Song of Ice and Fire, in about two months. It consumed me. I've never even liked the fantasy genre until now. But that was... riveting. A 5,000+ page rollercoaster. Wow. The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. Now that we've got you, we're not going to let you go.
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Jul 25, 2013 10:58
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Qwo posted:I just finished reading Watership Down last night, and I don't have much to say about it because it's just such a wonderful, simple book. I loved it! Adams achieves some really great characterizations without falling prey to sentimental anthropomorphism like you see in other environmentally-minded stories (and I was impressed with how Adams's clear environmentalism didn't overpower the story itself). In all, I don't think I've read a book with as much broad appeal as this one - it offers something for readers of all tastes and reading levels, which impressed me. In the spirit of "If you enjoyed this", you might want to give Garry Kilworth's House of Tribes a shot. It's in a similar vein, but with mice instead of rabbits and less mysticism. Bonus marks awarded for guessing when and where it's set.
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Jul 26, 2013 23:54
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I also found it hard to swallow the premise that huge numbers of middle class people would pack up their lives and families, abandon all the modern technology and conveniences, and go live like pioneers - some even leaving behind their own children who are physically unable to "step". This seems a lot more like the fantasy of the author than anything that real people would actually do. It's more the fantasy of American Libertarians, and I can entirely believe that they would do it.
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Sep 16, 2013 09:38
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RightClickSaveAs posted:I finished One Shot not long ago, which I grabbed a while ago when it was a B&N free friday ebook, and I guiltily enjoyed it. I'd read more of this series if they're ever on sale for cheap. Murderhobo is a great description for the protagonist, he has to have killed hundreds of people by now with the 18 or 19 books that are out, making him essentially a serial killer drifter. It would be slightly more accurate to describe Jack Reacher as a one-man A-Team who actually manages to hit people when he shoots.
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Sep 30, 2013 14:06
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Cream_Filling posted:To be fair, the A-Team was basically a band of murder-hobos, too. Apart from never killing anyone, hence my qualifier.
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Sep 30, 2013 18:23
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Butch Cassidy posted:The Sky People by S.M. Stirling Sorry, did you just say you'd re-read an S.M. Stirling book?
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Oct 16, 2013 22:49
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mallamp posted:If you actually liked Colour of Magic, then the actually good Pratchett books (Mort ->) will blow your mind for sure.. This. Start with Small Gods.
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Oct 20, 2013 11:27
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moot the hopple posted:Missed out on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House for the book club last month but still wanted to give it a go. The first half of the book felt like a lot of slow build up but it was worth it for the absolutely entrenched sense of dread pervading the latter half. While the supernatural phenomena occurring in the house were certainly frightening, I found that the slowly unraveling mind of the main character had a much more disturbing effect on me. Her darkly turned thoughts and her inexplicable, alternating feelings of paranoia, sudden attachment, love, and hatred for her fellow guests and the house was like an unsettling glimpse into madness. You should read We Have Always Lived In The Castle next. It's possibly even better.
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Nov 7, 2013 17:28
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Julzie posted:"Making Money" by Terry Pratchett. Alternate universe much like our own ... just set on a disc, carried by 4 titanic elephants standing on a Herculean cosmos "swimming" turtle ......... so fantasy then. Ex-con finds he must reinvigorate a dying city bank. Have read "Going Postal" a while ago, the precursory book but now I find I have to read it again to make sense of some things. The third book, Raising Steam, came out this week in the UK. Enjoy. 
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Nov 10, 2013 17:11
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Julzie posted:Oh my goodness there's a third! Thank you very much for telling me this! I'm in Aus, shall have to see if I can get my hands on a copy, wonder if it's out yet XD Yep. Someone in the Pratchett thread was saying that one Aussie bookseller has been selling copies since the 1st, but it was due out on the 5th.
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Nov 10, 2013 23:30
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Nikaer Drekin posted:I'm a big fan of the series, and I think The Girl Who Played with Fire is probably my favorite of the three, though the whole trilogy is really good. It's also the only one published in English under its original title.
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Nov 15, 2013 01:34
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Autonomous Monster posted:We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson. Short and sweet, exactly unlike arsenic poisoning. Not that I know of, but I'd be shocked if he hadn't. WHALITC is infinitely better than The Wasp Factory, though.
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Dec 10, 2013 19:35
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zhuangcg posted:I just finished reading "The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches)" by Anne Rice. This is a long story (1038 pages) about a Talamasca investigation of a family of witches spanning hundreds of years. It definitely wasn't one of her better books for me. Much of the book captures the feel of a scholarly investigation which gives it an air of authenticity at the expense of reading like a history textbook. There is a wealth of detail and all of the elements work well together and some parts of the book are absolutely fantastic but overall the pacing is just too slow and the book loses momentum due to its structure as a series of scholarly reports. Congratulations, this is the first time I've ever seen someone review The Witching Hour without saying "The protagonist is a woman who enjoys being raped".
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Dec 16, 2013 01:19
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snooman posted:The Crippled God - Final book of The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, by Steven Erikson It's up around five million if you include side stories, prequels and the five official shared world novels by Ian Cameron Esslemont.
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Dec 18, 2013 01:38
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TheOnionKnight posted:I'm starting the Malazan series now. Apparently, Steven Erikson was trained as an archaeologist. I imagine that could influence a fantasy author's writing in some pretty cool ways. Some pretty odd ways. Gardens of the Moon drops you right into the middle of things that aren't explained until later volumes, and in one or two cases aren't explained in the main sequence of ten at all. I asked Erikson once if he had given us the story out of order because that's how archaeologists nearly always make discoveries; he said he hadn't done it intentionally, but it could well have been a factor.
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Dec 21, 2013 02:03
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ProfessorProf posted:The general consensus on the Dresden Files - and I'll agree on this point - is that the early books are mediocre pulp, but it rapidly becomes awesome pulp. If you're going to recommend The Dresden Files to anyone, recommend the Felix Castor novels by Mike Carey instead. Same general area, but they're better in every conceivable way (or will be once Mike gets round to writing the final book).
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Jan 8, 2014 00:56
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All Nines posted:The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson. Having already loved The Haunting of Hill House, I figured that I ought to become familiar with what is probably her best-known work, and read some more along the way. I think Jackson really excels at writing unsettling stories like the title story and "The Daemon Lover," but the majority of the stories in here were completely mundane and didn't really feel worthwhile. Have you read We Have Always Lived In The Castle yet?
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Jan 9, 2014 01:08
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elbow posted:Yes, The Renegade is great as well. I think the problem with The Lottery is that it's such a well-known story that most people already know the ending, so the effect is a bit lost, and without that it's just a story, nothing remarkable. It is if Lottery Day happens to be your birthday. I got bought the bloody book for my birthday, too. Yeesh.
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Jan 9, 2014 20:34
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Attitude Indicator posted:I think some people didn't like the changes they made to the story, to make it work better as a film. What they seem to forget is that a movie is something entirely different from a book so it needed some changing, and that Adams wrote a lot of the changes himself before he died. It was a bit more streamlined and hollywood than the book. Oh, and Ford was a black guy. The casting of Mos Def as Ford was actually pretty good even though it didn't match the description of Ford in the books, because he is from New York. Ford's unexpurgated Guide entry for the Earth states that the best thing you can do when first arriving is go to New York and work as a taxi driver because nobody will care what you look like so long as you can speak English. In the context of the movie, you can assume that he did that himself and picked up the accent.
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Mar 11, 2014 17:15
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Lampsacus posted:Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll It's not just a poem, it's the dedication to the book in acrostic form. The first letter of each line spells "Alice Pleasance Liddell", the girl Carroll based Alice upon and wrote the book for.
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Mar 28, 2014 18:48
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socialsecurity posted:I just finished the Wheel of Time series after years of a friend pushing me to read it, it had a very slow middle section and some weird gender issues but overall I found it a decent enough story, looking now for something similar. The Malazan Book of the Fallen and ancillary works. See you in two years!
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Apr 20, 2014 09:22
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Homemaster posted:The Forever War 1) It would take a very long movie to get the point across. 2) Part of the story has a society where everyone is gay.
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May 18, 2014 20:02
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tuyop posted:Lolita is amazing and that's totally part if the appeal. You may want to rephrase that. It sounds like you're talking about the character.
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Jun 14, 2014 19:00
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liddl ninja posted:How to teach quantum physics to your dog by Chad Orzel. I used to know Chad Orzel back in the days of Usenet, I didn't know he'd written a book. I'll have to hunt it out.
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Jul 2, 2014 00:42
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Gertrude Perkins posted:The Girl With All The Gifts, by M.R. Cary. Amazing. Gripping, shocking, heart-rending. Surprises you with every chapter, hits you like a sledgehammer to the gut. Read it. Read it. Read it. Then read The House of War and Witness, because it's better and isn't I Am Legend. Much as I enjoy Mike's R novels and collaborations with spouse and spawn, I do wish he'd get the thumb out and write the last Felix Castor book. Apparently that's on the cards after the next Mike R project.
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Jul 31, 2014 15:56
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Gertrude Perkins posted:Sandman vol. 8: World's End by Neil Gaiman et al. After the adventure that Brief Lives was, this felt a little disappointing. I liked the concept (all these individuals stuck in a tavern sharing stories from their respective worlds) but I only really engaged with a couple of the tales. Next is volume 9, which is twice the size, so let's see how things go! You missed the theme of World's End, I think. Every story told at the inn is a story about someone else telling their own story to the storyteller. At the end Charlene chooses to stay at the inn because she believes she has no story of her own, and in doing so she becomes a fictional character in Brant's story - which in the framing story he is also telling in a drinking establishment. This is mirrored by Petrefax, who in his story of the air burial had said almost exactly the things Charlene says when he was asked to tell a tale but at the end chooses to go with Chiron to acquire a story of his own. My condolences on the terrible art you are about to suffer. Happily the last volume more than makes up for it.
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Aug 10, 2014 12:30
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Gertrude Perkins posted:You know what, that really does make sense in hindsight. Maybe it's because I didn't read the whole of 8 in one sitting - usually I'm quite good at catching that kind of symmetry. Not only is Hempel's art bad, it's also sandwiched between the two best artists to work on the run - Bryan Talbot and Michael Zulli. This makes it look even worse by comparison. What bugs me most, though, is that he got the longest run of any artist on the book.
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Aug 10, 2014 14:03
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xian posted:I LOVE Lucifer. I get that sandman is better, but I think I like lucifer more. The more you read around, the more you'll realise Sandman isn't better than Lucifer. Gaiman was doing something new, but he was recycling from limited sources. Brute, Glob, their pet Sandmam and Prez Rickard all appeared in old DC comics - this is known. What is less widely known is that their stories were featured in a single issue of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. Carey has since topped both Lucifer and Sandman with The Unwritten, so go read that as well.
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Aug 11, 2014 15:49
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Gertrude Perkins posted:Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste, by Carl Wilson. I love this kind of stuff - a critical academic analysis of Céline Dion intricately tied with Wilson's self-analysis on why he (and wider culture) hate her and her music. This version is packaged with a whole lot of essays written in response to the original book, by everyone from Krist Novoselic to Sheila Heti. It picks apart the concept of a "guilty pleasure", draws on a lot of great cultural theory (reminding me I need to re-read a lot of Bourdieu), and was generally a pretty fun read. If you're at all interested in popular music and culture, check it out. I'm damned if I can remember the author, but there's a book called I Hate Myself And Want To Die about the 50 most depressing songs of all time. Featuring prominently is Dion's "All By Myself", which is described (roughly) as follows: "If Celine Dion had been alive during World War 2 there would have been no need for the D-Day landings. They could have set up a PA system on the beaches playing All By Myself on loop, and the Wehrmacht would have committed suicide". Hilarious book, by the way, I recommend it if you can find it. E: it's by Tom Reynolds. There's also a sequel called Touch Me, I'm Sick about the 50 creepiest love songs. I've read it, it wasn't quite as sharp but still funny. Jedit fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 18:08
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DannyTanner posted:Yeah. The tone is very different between the two. I wasn't even sure how they could had made it into a movie without significant cutting of material (which they did). If by "significant cutting of material" you mean "the movie and book share only a name". Prism: try H.G. Wells' A Story of the Days To Come.
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Dec 1, 2014 11:49
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Poutling posted:I think I see what Glazer was going for thematically with the movie which does have the same sense of isolation in the main character but Glazer's very stylistically stark vision really worked much better on the screen than a more true to novel translation would have - when I heard they were filming a movie I was pretty skeptical on how they were going to film the big reveals without it becoming comedic. Actually it has the precise reverse kind of isolation in the main character. Johansson in the movie feels isolated from humans and develops an urge to fit in. In the book Isserley has been isolated from her own people by the surgery that made her look human, but doesn't want to fit in with humans or even accept that she's like them in any way - to the point where she lies to the visiting noble about human sentience so he won't stop them being used as cattle. Where Johansson develops empathy for her prey, Isserley is driven by destructive self-loathing. Glazer managed to miss literally everything that was interesting about the story and replaced it with desperate, failed attempts to seem meaningful.
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Dec 1, 2014 19:51
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Xzov posted:I've never read any alternate history books before but I enjoyed it. I liked the "what-if" scenarios; I just wish I knew more about the civil war (especially the leading individuals) to know how accurately Turtledove portrayed them. But Guns of the South was good enough that I've picked up his The Great War: American Front to read next, and encouraged me to look for more from the alternate history genre. I wouldn't have done that. The Great War and its two sequel series are literally just the two World Wars and the period between transplanted to the US with the South as Germany and the North as the Allies. If you want to read more Turtledove alt-history go for the Worldwar/Colonization series, which is "What would have happened if an alien conquest fleet had shown up in 1942?", and The Two Georges, a standalone novel set in a 1980s where the Revolutionary War never happened.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:41
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Pear-Drop posted:I just finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I can honestly say it's the creepiest thing I've ever read but you can gets hours of fun from it. Well I say that but in actuality most of the people who got fun out of it was my literature class who kept taking it from me and ogling it like some strange alien being. The less I say about the plot the better but I can say it's about a man who finds a mysterious record and investigates it. I should also mention it's quite a chore to get through as the formatting is all over the place, narrators constantly change and there are footnotes throughout. But you know the book you're reading is going to be great when the first sentence is "This is not for you". I got about three pages into House of Leaves and found myself in full agreement with the first sentence. Danielewski is the 21st century's answer to James Joyce. I am rereading Discworld. 
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Mar 19, 2015 16:23
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xian posted:I just finished Temps, a superhero fiction anthology edited by Neil gaiman and Alex Stewart that's now out of print. Very cool, most of the short stories are interesting early 90s British takes on superhero stuff. One of the stories, pitbull Brittan, happened to be both the longest and worst, but a lot of the other stories varied from good to stellar. Pitbull Britain is a direct spoof of 70s boys' war comics like Battle and Warlord. If you haven't read those you won't get the joke.
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Mar 21, 2015 20:44
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:That was also the only good movie translation of his books as well. There was a decent TV adaptation of The Face of Fear in 1990. Kevin "Batman" Conroy was the bad guy.
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Apr 4, 2015 14:21
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ICHIBAHN posted:aww man watch the film, it's very good but very different to the book The film is poo poo and has nothing to do with the book. In fact it's almost the precise opposite of the book in every way.
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Apr 8, 2015 14:36
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Bitchkrieg posted:Finally, The Invisibles (Vol 1) by G Morrison. I've waited years to read this comic -- not much of a GN person, but this was worth the wait. It satisfies the same fascination as RA Wilson for me; had I read this when I was 17-18, it would've been formative (now it's just tremendous entertainment). Enjoy five more volumes of Grant Morrison masturbating.
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Apr 17, 2015 12:58
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That's also not the twist. The real twist is that Melanie is going to end the human race as we know it, and that was telegraphed by her wishing she was called Pandora. Pandora doesn't only mean "gifted with everything", it also means "giver of everything" - and if you know the Pandora myth you can guess that she's going to follow it and let all of what we would perceive as evil out of the box.
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May 3, 2015 01:55
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