The identify that story/book thread: Home of the gas pump boy

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The identify that story/book thread: Home of the gas pump boy

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Harkano posted:

Also HOLY CRAP

I read these books years ago and just got into Holt in the last year or so and I love him. My mind is broken. Damned authors and their psuedonyms.

Thanks so much

What the loving gently caress. Are you serious?! I am ...amazed. If I had had to pick someone to be KJ Parker's real identity, Tom Holt would have been slightly below PG Wodehouse.

What the gently caress.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2008 16:01

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 23:58

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

hollowmoon posted:

The other involved a brother and sister whose Mother was ill (another of the Scholastic fantasy books). They were on their way to see a Duke with a lute with a crest on it. They get waylaid by bandits and one of them gets imprisoned in a tower. In the end the crest on the lute is the same crest as the Duke's and the two kids mother turns out to be the Duke's long lost sister or something.

You don't mean Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones, at all?

# ¿ Sep 3, 2008 08:56

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Fatkraken posted:

Childrens book. A Girl is on holiday, possibly in Scotland and meets a sea monster, possibly the loch ness monster. I don't remember much about the middle of the book, but the ending is fairly distinct. It turns out the monster is an alien, but was exiled to Earth for some crime or other and forced to change form. The real form of his species is a glowing ball of energy. Two of his people, a big red orb and a little silver orb come along for some reason, and I think at the end he saves the girl somehow and is judged to be virtuous and to have been rehabilitated, and allowed to take on his true form (a big gold orb) and return home.

I guess I must have been 8-10 when I read this, so it was written probably some time before 1990-92. I live in the UK, and I *think* the cover was dark red, with a picture of the monster on a white background.

The setting is completely wrong but the ending is Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones. He's Sirius the Dog Star, exiled to Earth for murder, and the other orbs (big red and small white) are the planetary bodies who framed him. However, it has nothing to do with sea monsters. Is this coincidence or could you be confusing two titles?

# ¿ Sep 23, 2008 15:54

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Monkey Trouble posted:

The other one, I can't remember as much about it...it was in some kind of garden and I think the character might have been shrunk down somehow because everying seemed to be giant. They used some kind of flower as a plate and used a pencil sharpener to get shavings off a huge nut to eat. I think he was attacked by a giant bird as well.

Is that The Borrowers Afield by Mary Norton?

# ¿ Sep 22, 2009 11:07

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

mania posted:

Book 1:
Short book, I read this 10 years ago for lit class, pretty sure it was published before 1980. I don't remember anything about the story, except that the main character is a young girl, there's bird of some sort - either a goose or a swan and I think it takes place in Europe.
Thanks!

The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico?

# ¿ Oct 28, 2009 22:38

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Johnny Aztec posted:

Think Morlock might could help me find this book?

I really want to know why you're so desperate to find this book.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2009 11:16

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Atreyu posted:

On reading a description of a murder in the local paper, a man is filled with remorse and goes to the local police station to hand himself over. Except he has a rock solid alibi for when the crime happened and is released by the cops. The murders continue and with each subsequent murder, the protagonist gets more and more convinced of having committed them, but the police invariably manage to prove he's not the murderer. It ends after a particularly graphic description of a murder - the protagonist shows up at the police station and the head cop says something to the effect of "Oh, it's you again is it? Listen this has got to stop or one of us is going to go seriously insane." This was in one of those old Alfred Hitchcock Presents short story collections.

'Good for the Soul' by Lawrence Block. I have it in a collection of his short stories called Some Days You Get The Bear.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2010 13:51

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

I hope this is OK to ask here: I need a quote identified! Only I can't remember either the quote or the speaker.

It's some tough nut American writer (of the 'bottle of whisky a day' type) and he said something along the lines of "I'd rather let the stableboy gently caress my wife than an editor touch my writing." Only that's not it, and googling similar words has got me nowhere, and I can't find it, and it's really annoying me. Anyone??

# ¿ May 26, 2010 11:30

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Lot 49 posted:

William Faulkner. Google gave me:

"I get drunk, I get mad, I get thrown from horses, I get all sorts of things. But I don't get edited. I'd rather see my wife get hosed by the stable boy."

plus a whole lot of sites about guys who want other men to sleep with their wives.

God drat, your Google-fu is impressive. Thanks! And I'm sorry about the cuckolding sites (which I got without even getting the result).

# ¿ Jun 2, 2010 22:16

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Hedrigall posted:

A book of weird short stories. I think they were illustrated. Wasn't Roald Dahl or Paul Jennings. Some of them I remember include:
a) A story about three princes who want to get a wish granted, and to do so they need to climb to the top of a huge tower. One tries to take the elevator and dies, the next starts using the stairs but is mean to a woman he meets cleaning the stairs and never progresses, the third helps the cleaning woman and reaches the top in no time.
b) A really poor kid finds a button/badge that says "Kick Me" and thinking it's stupid, kicks it over a fence. He then goes home to discover his family has become really rich and live in a nice house. But they end up more miserable than when they were poor.

Oh gently caress me, I had that! Now there's two of us suffering!

# ¿ Jun 9, 2011 12:54

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Hedrigall posted:

A book of weird short stories. I think they were illustrated. Wasn't Roald Dahl or Paul Jennings. Some of them I remember include:
a) A story about three princes who want to get a wish granted, and to do so they need to climb to the top of a huge tower. One tries to take the elevator and dies, the next starts using the stairs but is mean to a woman he meets cleaning the stairs and never progresses, the third helps the cleaning woman and reaches the top in no time.
b) A really poor kid finds a button/badge that says "Kick Me" and thinking it's stupid, kicks it over a fence. He then goes home to discover his family has become really rich and live in a nice house. But they end up more miserable than when they were poor.

Can't anyone get this? It's driving me nuts as well...

# ¿ Jul 14, 2011 21:17

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

funkybottoms posted:

trying to confirm that "berk" is not something said in polite company in England.

/off topic/ 'Berk' is fine. Ignore anyone who tells you it's a euphemism for oval office, that's just not true (except etymologically). It's slightly ruder than 'twit', not as rude as 'pillock', it's just a slightly humorous way to say 'idiot'.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2011 22:03

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

It's definitely not Pratchett.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2012 13:44

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Hedrigall posted:

A book of weird short stories. I think they were illustrated. Wasn't Roald Dahl or Paul Jennings. Some of them I remember include:
a) A story about three princes who want to get a wish granted, and to do so they need to climb to the top of a huge tower. One tries to take the elevator and dies, the next starts using the stairs but is mean to a woman he meets cleaning the stairs and never progresses, the third helps the cleaning woman and reaches the top in no time.
b) A really poor kid finds a button/badge that says "Kick Me" and thinking it's stupid, kicks it over a fence. He then goes home to discover his family has become really rich and live in a nice house. But they end up more miserable than when they were poor.

Coming back to this from page 55: This is The Magician who Kept a Pub, by Dorothy Edwards, who wrote the Naughty Little Sister stories. I was going through a box of old books in the attic this weekend and found it!

# ¿ Jan 27, 2013 15:35

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

ToxicFrog posted:

In responding to these and looking up covers for Black Ice to see if it looked familiar, I remembered parts of the cover, and that was enough for me to remember the title, and it has nothing to do with fire or ice. I'm sorry.

Memory is weird. That book of Hedrigall's that I tracked down a couple of posts above, I remembered it really well, couldn't place the title but I totally knew the cover was dark blue/black with brightly coloured firework effects on the front. Would have recognised it anywhere, would have put money on my accurate recollection of it, can still visualise it now.

When I pulled the book - my own old copy, the only one I have ever seen - out of the box, I got this:

# ¿ Jan 28, 2013 14:47

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 23:58

Shonagon: Mar 27, 2005; It is impervious to reason or pleading, it knows no mercy or patience.

Buml0r posted:

This one's going to be tricky, I'm afraid.

Children's books, hardback, mid-80s, and I read them in the UK, so they could have been UK books. My first ever teacher used to get them from the book club she was a member of. There was nothing memorable about the stories, but the gimmick was that each page was a double-page spread of a painted illustration, nothing too fancy, but there were things hidden in the pictures for you to find. Don't think Where's Wally (although the size and shape of the books was about the same), nothing small and tricky, the characters were large and page-filling. It's just that, in the top corner of one of the pages, you had a visual list of things to find hidden somewhere in the picture. The only one I remember was one where the child who was the star of the story was venturing into a garden shed, and the key in the corner had a little picture of a snail. Sure enough, there was an identical snail on one of the shelves or crawling on the wall, or something.

And, er, that's it I'm afraid. I do have a title for one of them, but it's entirely unhelpful in tracking it down, because it was called Find the Penguin - or Hunt, or Follow, do something to the penguin anyway. The reason this isn't much use is that any search containing the words "penguin" and "book" just gets you Penguin Books.

So. Long shot. Anyone? :/

I'd put a small sum on them being published by Usborne, they did a hell of a lot of books like that.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2013 16:55

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The identify that story/book thread: Home of the gas pump boy