Myst posted:

I continuously forget what this book I read a few years back was called. It was the first in a series, I think, and the others had yet to come out so I forgot about it. It was a fantasy book from a few years back.

It was set in a winter setting and featured various clans, very celtic like. Long house meetings and such. The main character, I think, went by the name of Raven. He was beginning to develope a mystic-like ability to hunt by sensing the heartbeats of an animal/person from a distance and being able to shoot an arrow into it. He had a brother who was a war hero or some such, I think.

There was also a city in the story, which had an evil patriarch kind of guy. And it flashed to a huge tower every so often where the evil patriarch had kept a man in solitude for years and years stuck far underground and he had odd revelations and visions. I think he managed to get free at the end of the book.

Anyway, that's all I can really gather. It was a pretty neat book and i'd like to re-read it and follow up on the series if I could figure out what the hell it was.

LittleSunshine posted:

Mark Chadbourn's Dark Age trilogy? http://www.markchadbourn.net/books.htm and scroll down a bit.

Vitae posted:

This has been bugging me for a while..
I'll try to recall as much of the book as I can, I read it in middle school.

Kids in a really awful situation, world gone corrupt and everyone fends for themselves, living in small apartments scrounging for basic necessities. Kids find some sort of virtual reality device, transports them to a new world where everything is awesome, they become addicted to this virtual reality world.

This is all I remember of the book, I probably read it somewhere around the early 90's.
Anyone have any idea what it could be?

mania posted:

It may also have been one of the Famous Five. I vaguely remember a cave that was only accessible at low tide.

wheatpuppy posted:

Number one is The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken. It's part of the Armitage family series. The kid just needed one more box to free the woman trapped in the tiny paper village. It's pretty .

Rylen posted:

A few years back I was told about a book I "absolutely had to read". The plot involves all of the smart people in the world packing up and either living underground or at one of the poles (the fellow who suggested it couldn't remember which).

These smart people were also having children at a slower rate (or not at all) compared to the stupid folks back on the main land/above ground.

I don't have more than that to go on, as the man who insisted I read it has passed away.

It's probably an older book (at least 30 years old I reckon). I'd love to read it but I haven't a clue on how to locate this mysterious book. Hopefully it rings a bell with someone and I'll get lucky!

Beach Bum posted:

Science fiction short story.

A child is asking his father questions about things like "why is the sky blue" and whatnot, but the father doesn't know and is frustrated when he tries to think, by things like this buzzing noise in his ears. The father was worried about his child because of some sort of intelligence test that the government runs, and worries about if his kid was going to "pass" or not.

I seem to remember reading it in a collection, but I'll be damned if I can find it anywhere.

angelicism posted:

Fantasy book.

There is something like 4 or 5 tribes or kingdoms and for whatever reason they need to pick a new overlord and the way this is done is one person from each tribe/kingdom is chosen by some special cat/lion/etc and they have to perform a number of difficult tasks. One of the tasks was something about panning salt out of the salt fields? Whatever that means.

Anyway some random young guy gets picked to be one of the competitors by the magic cat despite the fact that it's usually big older burly guys, and he obviously by the end of the book succeeds.

There's something about how important cats are to this country/land and I think at some point he gets bitten by one of the big cats and it leaves a scar on his wrist or something?

angelicism posted:

I'm in awe of how you managed to figure this out from my haphazard description.

Casu Marzu posted:

I'm glad to see this thread. Contact is on, and it reminded me of a book I read when I was younger.

I was fairly young when I read this. I'm fairly sure I was probably eight or nine, so 12 years ago or so. It was already in trade paperback, but still on a standalone spinning rack when I read it, so it was fairly new, and something worth highlight.

The premise was something close to Contact, from what I recall. A lady scientist at some facility is doing the whole listen and record and attempt to decipher space noise and whatnot.

She (and maybe a team with her) discover a pattern or signal coming from Sine waves (?) or something, possibly even naturally occurring from the Earth, or areas on the planet.

Anyway, this discovery leads her, along with some bad guys following her to a wormhole, which, for some reason I believe, was outside an old German concentration camp. This wormhole sucks her, part of her team, possibly, and a baddie and zips them across the universe.

Now the more memorable parts to the novel begin.

The chick is zipped off to a "dead planet" there was no life, but only remains of an abandoned, advanced civilization.

Another guy is sent to a jungle-ish planet with primitive occupants. They treat him like nobility, shower him in foods and girls and gifts, and whatever. Then they sacrifice him to their god.

The bad guy that got sucked into this hole gets sent to a Hades type planet, where some nefarious dude condemns him to a painful existence.

That's all I really remember. The chick possibly makes it back to earth.

Casu Marzu posted:

Why yes, that does ring a faint bell.

Darth Brookz posted:

When I was younger there was this book in the comedy section at bookstores about a guy who would write fake letters to people/corporations and get a real response back. One page would feature the note he wrote the other would be like a photocopy and transcript of the one he would receive back.

I've tried goggling various parts of what I posted but haven't found any clues about an author or title.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Starblind posted:

That sounds like the Gears' People of the Wolf. There's a whole series of them.

It definitely is, I looked up the cover and it's blue with mammoths. It's gotta be it.

WastedJoker posted:

Elohssa Gib posted:

Carol Berg's The Rai-Kirah series

Transformation (ISBN 0-451-45795-1) (2000)
Revelation (ISBN 0-451-45842-7) (2001)
Restoration (ISBN 0-451-45890-7) (2002)

Idonie posted:

The author is Carol Berg; I'm afraid I don't remember the titles but they're relatively recent (last 15 years) so Goodreads or Amazon or something should tell you.