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If you have a Half Price Books nearby, they'll also buy drat well near everything, and donate the rest to school reading programs or programs that take textbooks and provide them to underfunded secondary schools across the world. That said I think the most I've ever gotten from them was $30 for a banker's box full of books so it's more about convenience than actually making money.
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Apr 28, 2018 19:50
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I've been meaning to message Hieronymus Alloy to get the cosmic horror thread name changed to just a general horror thread for a while now, but I kinda didn't want to do it until I had time to write a decent OP. Edit: also, to offer a differing opinion, Laird Barron 100% gets overhyped, especially when he first hit the scene, but I still think he's worth checking out. IMO his collection Imago Sequence is probably his strongest overall offering. You could also just grab a general collection of horror short stories or weird fiction with him in it, usually his best stuff makes it into other collections anyway, and would give you a sense of whether you click with his style. He has a few really good stories, but yes, in general his prose is a bit weak. And practically every protagonist is a cigar smoking, whiskey guzzling, stone cold muscleman. Even the women. Also I like Jeremy Robert Johnson, but he's a bit of a left-field recommendation without any info on what sort of horror somebody likes, or what they've already read. He verges on bizarro horror, which definitely isn't for everyone. Still very good though. Haven't heard of the other book. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 15:38 on May 10, 2018 |
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May 10, 2018 14:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I don't follow either thread closely (I don't want to be scared!) but I had assumed that the Stephen King thread was "general horror" and the Cosmic Horror thread was "lovecraft derived horror." I'll ask in the thread. I haven't followed the King thread in a while but it seemed like it really was 90% King discussion. The Cosmic Horror one has definitely drifted more to general horror. It might make more sense to start an actual general horror thread, though, since there's not a ton of traffic in the Cosmic Horror one, plus a huge proportion of the thread kind of boils down to "boy that Lovecraft, wasn't he problematic?" Which it should, I guess, he def was problematic, but it probably turns away posters who don't want to talk about Lovecraft. Also join us, get scared, or we can suggest some non-scary books with ghosts and goblins for you! How do you feel about Goosebumps? Or V.C. Andrews?
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May 10, 2018 15:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:My favorite horror story is "The Book of the Dunwich Cow" in The Adventures of Samurai Cat, when Miaowara Tomokato visits the new england town of Dunwich, in which all the houses are built only out of victorian attics stacked on top of one another, and battles the great god K'Chu. I have no idea how much of this post is true and/or meant ironically, but I do know I love every word of it.
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May 10, 2018 16:15
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Enfys posted:I would like to try a scary book that isn't gross. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is excellent. As is The Elementals by Michael McDowell (though there's a couple brief gruesome moments in that one, but it's mostly about sand). The Grip of It by Jac Jemc is incredibly eerie and unsettling and not really gross at all. Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul Tremblay is not strictly capital-H horror but it's very good and creepy and I really wanted to recommend A Head Full of Ghosts by the same author but the latter has some body-horrorish moments if I remember right. Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt didn't have any big grossness, that I can remember. Bird Box by Josh Malerman also doesn't really have any gross shock value stuff. There's a ton more good horror that doesn't lean on gore or shock value, those are just the ones that spring to mind, I could probably find more when not phone-posting. Honestly gratuitous grossness is kind of a uniquely recent thing in horror novels, and we largely have King and Barker to blame/thank for that, I think, so there's ton to pick from that's less blood 'n' guts or weird sex stuff, but you have to dig a bit depending on what's in vogue at the moment.
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May 10, 2018 16:37
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I do too, I think I will bump it up my list given the recommendation. Franchescanado hasn't led me wrong.
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May 10, 2018 17:49
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I figure I should mention it in here too: there is now a General Horror thread for discussing horror novels. Or horror-adjacent novels. Or how a totally-not horror book scared you for some reason, idk. The cosmic horror thread is going to stay open for the time being, too.
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May 15, 2018 17:25
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You could always just link them this, it's got some choice morsels that can't be unread (given that it's Piers Anthony's actual, for real writing quoted there I feel like it goes without saying but it's probably  depending on your personal standards for such things) https://hradzka.livejournal.com/392471.html
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Jun 28, 2018 17:45
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I dunno, even as a 12 or 13 year old I twigged on to the fact that there was something loving weird and uncomfortable about the book where a demon changed genders every time it had sex, so it had to sex itself up a bunch of times in the book to be male or female or whatever for any number of "plot reasons"
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Jun 28, 2018 18:06
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So for fun and morbid interest, I went digging to figure out the name of the book I just referenced. Turns out it's the annual classic "If I Pay Thee Not In Gold" which, hilariously, was a) co-written with Mercedes Lackey and b) was actually viewed as refreshingly forward thinking for its depiction of women and sexuality in fantasy. Yikes, the early 90's were bad. Like, my memory of the book is super spotty at best, and I'm not 100% sure I ever actually got all the way to the end of it, but I'm pretty sure there was something about only women having magical powers, but some women didn't, so they turned them into what were effectively prostitutes destined to pleasure the male slaves of the country or some such nonsense. I do remember the main character could only avoid execution by sexually conquering the most majestic male in the kingdom or something. Nothing screams "feminism" like having to save your life by having sex with a man. Have fun unpacking that one, thread, it is a gem of probably well-intentioned but shockingly tone-deaf 90s totally-not-erotica-just-fantasy. edit: oh this is just the cherry on the top of the cake: http://www.mercedeslackey.com/books/ifipay.html MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Jun 28, 2018 |
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Jun 28, 2018 18:34
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chernobyl kinsman posted:it's made entirely worth it by the ending, which is an insanely prescient view of what the First World War would be like with the advent of industrialized warfare funny, I totally didn't pick up on that when I read it at age 10
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Aug 8, 2018 19:40
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A question for Dickens fans/scholars/whatever: So I know Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished, but how unfinished is it? Like, is it functionally pretty readable, just without an ending, or does it feel unedited and fragmentary?
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Aug 26, 2018 02:50
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Mel Mudkiper posted:The Elementals obvs This is an excellent suggestion. It's more spooky than Blackwater and quite a bit shorter but still excellent. I'd be very down for re-reading this because I went through it too fast last time and would like to digest it a little more. I wish there was an ebook version of A Night in the Lonesome October, I think that would be a decent BotM.
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Sep 25, 2018 21:03
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Oh, we did that back in like 2014: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3669218&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 I can't exactly spam a thread in the archive with posts about how great Snuff is.
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Sep 25, 2018 21:08
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Himuro posted:Any suggestions on reading faster? I want to read more but want to read so many books. I have a very, very visual brain and imagination so when I read I end up making every book into a movie by doing tons of sub vocalization. I realize that reading faster is all about limiting that but it’s a hard habit to break. My honest answer is: don't try reading faster, be more willing to not finish books that aren't worth your time. What that means exactly varies by the person, but personally if I get about a quarter of the way into a book, sometimes less, without it grabbing me somehow I ditch it. Trying to learn to read faster, in my experience (and general experience of a lot of friends/acquaintances) means less enjoyment or absorption. Not much point to being able to read two books a week if you don't remember them or miss half of the nuance in whatever it is you're reading. Believe me, I get the impulse to put a big reading list together and churn through it, but honestly the books that are most worth reading, imo, are worth taking your time. I've read 70-80 books a year for the last two years and in retrospect I wish I hadn't. I mean, if your natural reading speed is such that you get through that many, more power to you. But for me it meant rushing/skimming a higher percentage of the books I was reading than I'm willing to do in the future. About halfway through this year, I started putting down books that weren't good and it's made my life significantly better. Also yeah, audiobooks are a good way to get through a big number of books over the course of the year, but I pretty much only do audiobooks for genre fic that I know isn't going to have stellar prose or anything. I've even returned a couple of Audible books because I realized early on that I was missing out on good prose or being able to take the book in at my own pace. Hell, I just did that with Something Wicked This Way Comes, and I'm so glad I did, it was a much better experience reading it myself vs. listening to it IMO. Edit: just to keep this ramble going, it's worth mentioning that a lot of high school students in the US in the last couple of decades were taught a really stupid way of engaging with "littrachaw" in my opinion. I know it was drilled into me to leave no symbol unanalyzed, to leave no metaphor unpondered, and that there must be one authoritative interpretation of any given piece of literature. This is patently stupid. If you want to read a lot of good literature, just read it. Absorb it at your pace, don't worry about whether or not you're getting every layer of the book at every single moment. If you're concerned you've missed something, hell, read the book again, or take advantage of this wonderful thing that is the internet to find out what other people may make of whatever it is you've just read. There's not a single, exclusive "right way" to read great works of fiction, and I wish US schools weren't so stupid about how they teach lit. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Oct 26, 2018 |
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Oct 26, 2018 05:17
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I had a friend in high school who went to every bookstore in town and scribbled something on the fourth or fifth page of every copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We were going to call him out for being a big dick until we looked at the books and saw he was writing poo poo like "Dumbledore's sled is Rosebud", "Severus Snape is Keyser Soze", and "Harry's father is secretly Darth Vader".
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Oct 30, 2018 17:18
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Krankenstyle posted:Yes, you can enjoy a story even if you know the ending, but it is a different quality of enjoyment than if you don't. The former can be experienced many times, but the latter can only be experienced once (barring brain damage, hypnosis, dementia etc). It's pretty crappy to take it away from someone. I'm this way personally. I don't care if a piece of fiction gets spoiled, really, and I'm late to the party on everything so I rarely get to go into anything blind, but if somebody is going out of their way to spoil the endings to things just to be a dick, I'll probably stab them, yeah.
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Oct 30, 2018 19:54
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At a local county library I frequent, it's almost guaranteed that any middlingly popular book trilogy/series will be missing the first book, since the series is popular enough that the first book will get damaged/lost over the years, but often not popular enough to justify buying a brand new copy every time it happens (at least at the criminal rates that libraries get charged when they buy direct).
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Jan 18, 2019 19:21
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Has anyone read the Drenai series? Somebody told me I should read it and it sounds awful. Is it awful or good? Can anybody tell me more about it without spoilers? I read the first book and it didn't at all make me want to read the rest. It was pretty boilerplate and unremarkable, so unless the rest of the series is somehow much more remarkable I can't see myself ever reading it.
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Feb 14, 2019 05:13
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Rolo posted:I’m not a monster for giving up on a book, right? I loved The Shining and was excited to get into Doctor Sleep but I’m just not into it and I’m not reading as much as I did with other books. Life is too short to read bad books/books you aren't into. My enjoyment of books in general has skyrocketed since I gave myself permission to drop books that weren't doing it for me. I know that sounds like a stupid problem to have but I blame the way I was taught lit in junior high/high school (the "decypher these symbols and motifs and themes so you can unlock the book and absorb its One True Interpretation" method). I've read a lot of books that were just a waste of time mostly due to sunk cost fallacy. I'm glad I've gotten over that. That said, there are definitely books out there that are worth the work and reward perseverance, though of course I can't come up with any off the top of my head. protip Doctor Sleep isn't one of them. I enjoyed the book but it's kinda weak overall and is tonally nothing like The Shining. Really the only thing it has in common is Danny Torrance and some spoilery stuff, but I otherwise wouldn't call it a "sequel", either in plot or in spirit. Also it has the classic King problem of the ending just kind of happening, messily
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Mar 11, 2019 18:54
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I'm also much more likely to put a book down temporarily if I'm not in the right mindset for it, especially if the book deserves a little more attention than I can give it. I started reading Rebecca around the holidays and while I was enjoying it, I felt like I was blowing through it a little too quickly purely because I was busy, so I put it down and just started reading it again. I think it was a good choice, and I feel like I'm getting more out of the book now.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:06
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Rolo posted:Yeah I don’t mind a book that’s a little work, I loved the Dostoevsky books I’ve read, but reading Stephen King was supposed to be the equivalent of a Taco Bell meal and this one isn’t keeping me entertained. The later you get into King's output the more the books become him exorcising his substance abuse problems (Doctor Sleep) or fixating on physical issues after getting hit by a car (Dreamcatcher) or reminiscing about how great things used to be back in the day when he was younger (all of them) and all these things tend to make his later books kind of ponderous and hard to enjoy at length. I think he had his best "cheeseburger and fries" kind of books, to use his own terminology, much earlier in his career.
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Mar 11, 2019 19:24
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I assume Hieronymous is busy since I don't see a thread, but does anyone know if the BotM for April has been decided yet?
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Apr 1, 2019 16:19
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hah, my bad. I was looking in the unstickied threads like a dumbass.
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Apr 1, 2019 16:48
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Ok whew I was trying to figure out if there was some weird April Fools thing going on Nope, I'm just shockingly unobservant.
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Apr 1, 2019 16:52
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:One of my favorite movies about ghosts is Lake Mungo, so I’m there for the concept, but oh well. Mel Mudkiper posted:Theres a ghost in Blackwater Everyone should read Blackwater, and I thought that ghost was particularly unsettling for some reason. There's so many reasons to love Blackwater so everyone should read it anyway But if you want a really good twist on the traditional haunted house novel, The Elementals (also by McDowell) is very good. I haven't seen Lake Mungo so I can't tell you a book that's much like it, but different takes on the haunted house idea may be my favorite category of books, there should be some in the terrible first post of the horror thread. If not, I can probably barf up a list of them.
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Apr 23, 2019 23:25
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If anything Goodreads review aggregates are way too high, especially for genre stuff. There's a load of very bad fantasy, sci-fi, and horror rated at 4+ stars so take most of it with a grain of salt. Insert obligatory "all fantasy, sci-fi, and horror is bad" response from whoever here
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May 6, 2019 18:39
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Ben Nevis posted:Yeah. There's a lot of that. Also the fact that every book is basically 3.2-4.1. The lowest rated GR book I've read, No Knives in the Kitchens of this City, was really pretty good. I was curious, turns out the three lowest rated books I've read were Twilight Pariah, The Graveyard Apartment, and Universal Harvester. Twilight Pariah is an obscure just-okay horror novella by Jeffrey Ford so I can kind of get that rating, and I blame Universal Harvester's low rating on the fact that it was very stupidly marketed as a horror novel, but I'm not sure why GR hates The Graveyard Apartment. It's not a book that will blow you away but it's a pretty good supernatural horror novel and deserves a bit more attention than it got in the US. Though "hates" may be a strong word here. Like you said, even Twilight Pariah is at a 3.16. edit: I looked a little deeper in the list and it turns out The Grip of It, The Deep, The Cipher, Ararat, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, House of Small Shadows, and The Turn of the Screw are all in the "bottom" 20 on GR, of books I've read and logged, so maybe GR just generally hates horror. Hilariously, Heart of Darkness is down there too. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 17:37 on May 7, 2019 |
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May 7, 2019 17:35
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What sort of person is so self-obsessed that they are so absolutely certain a bunch of pop psychology and business-lite authors are dying to hear all of your shower thoughts and hot takes on their work that you'd actually suggest they sit through your half-baked book report?
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May 13, 2019 15:55
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Mel Mudkiper posted:CEO of a tech startup Yeah I guess that is pretty self evident tbf to the CEOs of tech startups of the world, most of the books targeted at them can actually be summarized in a half sheet of pithy, usually unoriginal and obvious aphorisms, so I kinda doubt he's missing out on much. At least I hope he's not speed-audiobooking, like, One Hundred Years of Solitude and trying to track down the ghost of Marquez to discuss the meaning of the golden fishes or something like that. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe I do wish it was that
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May 13, 2019 16:34
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I'd say I'm happier with her glorifying books than glorifying jade vagina eggs, but I'm sure it's 95% trash anyway
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Aug 21, 2019 19:51
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Hey Hieronymous, when will we have a BotM thread? There's a bunch of people in the Reading Challenge thread asking for a book from Oceania so we could probably rope some of them into reading it
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Sep 5, 2019 16:18
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Yeah tracking what I have and haven't read is about the only thing I use Goodreads for and it works pretty well for that purpose. As for what I want to read, that is a blasted hellscape of handwritten lists, Trello boards, Google docs, Amazon wishlists, and wishlists at multiple libraries.
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Sep 26, 2019 16:53
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Quad posted:I got called pretentious today, because my desk at work has a few books on it, mostly from Vonnegut (who writes at, what, a 6th grade reading level?) and now I'm gonna just buy Actual Pretentious books to fill out the space because gently caress that guy. all six volumes of Knausgaard's My Struggle or get a copy of Cyclonopedia and convince him you're slightly unhinged
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Nov 20, 2019 18:36
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A human heart posted:all the books being recommended are just good ones. an actual pretentious book would be like all that pseudo literary american crapola that mel mudkiper reads. Yeah stack your desk with Aquarium, Swamplandia, and Snow Child
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Nov 21, 2019 04:40
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Is Moby Dick officially the BotM? I'm dying to hear bookgoon's thoughts on sperms
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Dec 5, 2019 21:17
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Sham bam bamina! posted:(I am not actually interested in asking her out.) nope, you can't un-light this particular goonsignal, you must accept the consequences
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Dec 17, 2019 21:03
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Franchescanado posted:New Challenge Thread: successfully ask out liquor person or eat a whole hotdog cart’s supplies within 6 hours. But you must ask her out using only quotations from Gravity's Rainbow
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Dec 17, 2019 22:00
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Much like a whole lot of things from the past decade, this makes me feel both deeply disappointed and completely unsurprised
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Dec 20, 2019 23:30
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Lex Neville posted:wait isn't skipping forwards and back for annotations way simpler on an ereader? It really depends on the book and how the annotations/footnotes are formatted. Some just link you to a separate part of the book, which can lose your spot in the book depending on which ereader/app you're using; on others the annotations pop up in their own window that you can X out of and still be at the same place in the book. I've seen more and more of the latter, but the first still crops up from time to time.
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Jan 13, 2020 18:55
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