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Jedit posted:So it's a bad book, then.
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Jun 23, 2013 10:43
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I know it was covered to death in the last thread but I just finished Perdido Street Station and I absolutely loved it to bits. He repeats himself with the polysyllabic words a bit (ineluctably inchoate in its opaque cacophony) and the last-minute revelation that Yag is a rapist kinda came out of nowhere and did nothing except show off how  dark the story is, but it was refreshing to see a genre novel with this immensely detailed backstory that doesn't read like a drat textbook. He's obviously put a lot of work into his setting but he knows exactly when to pull back and tell the story instead. Also, Mieville is seriously hunky. 
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Jul 6, 2013 08:19
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ulvir posted:Now get to reading The Scar. It's the best book in the Bas-Lag series, in my opinion.
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Jul 6, 2013 11:58
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Christ, I just finished The Wise Man's Fear. I'm sorry, sci-fi/fantasy thread. When you tell me a book is terrible, I'll goddam believe you from now on. The book has 200 pages of "Kvoth counts the money in his pockets again", 100 pages of "he blocks her STRIKING BEAR with his MEAT FIST UPPERCUT SUPREME" and 80 pages of "the best fairy sex ever guys". Also, more than one page of Denna. That is too many pages of loving Denna. God forbid anything interesting actually happens, it includes snappy paragraphs like "we were attacked by pirates, shipwrecked and had to make our way back to land but that's totes boring so let's move on and have some more KVOTH COMPLAINING ABOUT MONEY YAAAAY". It's not quite the worst book I've read this year, but only because I read self-published kindle singles for laughs.
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Aug 11, 2013 12:10
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Wangsbig posted:Oh boy The Emperor of Thorns was underwhelming. The setting interested me enough to force myself through three pretty unlikable books but Mark Lawrence was too in love with his weird brooding anime prince to expand on the great world he created. It's really good despite how I make it sound. I still think Jorg is basically Joffrey, except the author expects us to like him for some reason. Oh boo hoo he got stuck in a thorn bush once. Totally an excuse to rape rape rape murder rape your way across half the known world. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Aug 27, 2013 |
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Aug 27, 2013 17:00
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Wangsbig posted:Thanks for the suggestions! I'll pick up Sabriel tomorrow. 1) rape two girls 2) burn them alive 3) laugh about it A rape scene would be horrifying. A rape scene where the rapist then burns his victims alive and has a jolly old chinwag about it with his mates while the girls are still burning pushes the thing into ridiculous territory. The fact that it never comes up again only makes it worse: the whole point of that scene is to be all WOW THIS IS SO DARK LIKE FRANK MILLER FOR REALS. You know where else "it's not his fault, somebody else forced him to rape" came up? Dominic Deegan. That's the only other place I've seen that's tried to pull something so completely ridiculous, but even Dominic Deegan didn't have the protag laughing about the whole thing while it was going on. And besides, 'a wizard did it' is such a cliche and such a terrible piece of writing that it's become shorthand for 'the writer gave up/can't be bothered explaining'. I made a promise to finish every book I picked up this year, and Emperor of Thorns was the book that made me break it. You're drat right I'm bitter. Even The Wise Man's Fear had Rothfuss' wonderfully readable prose to propel its broken engine through to the finish line. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Aug 28, 2013 |
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Aug 28, 2013 15:22
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Wait, people don't like American Gods? I'm one of the most critical assholes in this thread and I can't think of anything bad to say about it.
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Sep 5, 2013 04:16
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My dad keeps recommending me all this weird creepy cyberpunk. There was this one book where the opening chapter featured a woman walking into an office, going into the toilets, then making GBS threads out a robot cockroach covered in tiny microphones so she could 'bug' the place. It was terribly worded, so it sounded like she had a generator in her chest and connecting wires going up her rear end. The book was heavy enough to use as a blunt instrument, but I could never finish that first chapter. I don't remember much else about the book, but I have a distinct feeling it was by Peter F. Hamilton. I dunno if my dad is secretly a pervert or what but now whenever somebody mentions Peter F. Hamilton, I remember that awful robot rear end cockroach. Thanks a lot, dad.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:36
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Phummus posted:So back to the recommendations for me I guess, since Dust doesn't sound worth reading.
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Sep 7, 2013 23:04
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Junkenstein posted:Yeah, UK. I mean, they're still a pain, but they're one of the main reasons many of my favourite authors can write as a career instead of a hobby, so I'm ok with it.
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Oct 8, 2013 03:47
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Has anybody read The Iron Druid Chronicles? Both Goodreads and Amazon keep recommending them to me, but the blurbs are giving me this really creepy quasi-erotica feel and I don't want to buy them if it's some weirdo stealth paranormal 50 Shades of Grey or something. Assuming they're not pagan-porn, are they any good?
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Feb 8, 2014 02:43
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coyo7e posted:Is the guy in black on the left, holding an enema bottle?
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Feb 11, 2014 04:27
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I'm making my way through Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, which people kept recommending because I like Mieville. I don't really get it. The world is fascinating, but written with all the verve and colour of an accountant on prozac. I don't know how something that should be so interesting is such a total slog. I'm about 15% of the way in. Does it get better? Is there something else of his I should try reading first to get more used to the prose style?
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Mar 16, 2014 11:16
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I just got through reading Bios by Robert Anton Winston. It's very good, but thematically incredibly similar to Axis. His prose is getting better and I like the shift to a more small-scale intimate story. It's just kinda of annoying that again that the antagonist is some grandiose, world-spanning vague unknown that turns out to be a gigantic alien consciousness that has no ill-will towards humanity, but is so very different from us that its attempts to communicate with us end up being fatal. The climax is the protagonist having their body colonised by something physical (crystals in Axis, fungus/bacteria in Bios) that allows them a link with the grand consciousness but also ends up killing them while they spout a big monologue to an ancillary character about how everything in the universe is connected and it's so beautiful.
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Aug 25, 2015 03:08
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Does anybody have a link to the old SF/F thread? I'm trying to dig up a specific post from it, but it seems to have vanished from the forums entirely.
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Nov 11, 2015 21:55
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