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Last year I set a target for 52 and beat it handily. This year, I'm going to be conservative and up it only to 64 - I got a lot of reading done on the bus last year, which I won't be doing nearly as much of in 2014.
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Jan 2, 2014 05:21
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Iron Council was a brutal slog and accounts for most of the month; I read the other five books in the last week. I liked it more than Perdido Street Station, but not, I think, enough for me to keep reading Mieville. I like the style of his writing at the small scale, and I like Bas-Lag, but the overall plots just leave me cold. PSS was "are you loving serious? This won awards?"; Iron Council, like The Scar, was "wow, that was just...not worth the effort." ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 20:51
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quote:
Correia is not a good writer but he is a fun one. The Grimnoir trilogy is basically alternate prohibition-era steampunk X-Men fanfic, and that's exactly what I was hoping for; sometimes you need to just shut your brain off for a while and watch the explosions. Warbreaker was excellent; I liked it a lot more than The Way of Kings. My biggest complaint is that it felt like it ended too quickly, with very little denoument after the climax. I kept picking up my reader and expecting it to still be showing Warbreaker. It's not quite right to say that it didn't feel finished, but it felt like it took my brain a while to catch up to the fact that it was over. Spadoink posted:And everybody should read Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore. It is another genre-crossing book, and will probably appeal to fantasy, mystery, contemporary and lighter-fare readers. Occultism! Some kind of maybe magic? A book store! Googlers! Delicious! I liked Penumbra right up to the end, and then the ending was so bad that it retroactively erased all enjoyment I'd gotten up until then. The one-two punch of the incredibly stupid scene where they turn the full might of Google on the cipher followed by it turning out to be a simple Ceasar cipher that they should have been able to break in seconds just completely killed it for me.
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Mar 3, 2014 16:31
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Spadoink posted:Haha - I've given up on expecting satisfactory endings, so this didn't bother me. I saw the actual ending coming for a while in the book, and found the use of google as kind of hilarious. The Google environment is always held up as some kind of mythic of workplace (they get hammocks! and nap rooms! and other things that no one in a regular corporate office ever gets!), and I enjoyed the depiction of Google as some kind of free wheeling creative-play kindergarten. Heh. Of course Google would fail - if this was a teen drama, google would be the quarterback, with bright white teeth and a 4.0 gpa and a red sports car and a hot girlfriend. The obvious favourite never wins - the underdog, a person rather than a behemoth, had to crack the code. Oh, the bit that bothered me wasn't that it didn't work - I saw that coming a mile away. What bothered me was the fact that the entire scene was one very small step above a braindead-summer-action-flick "they're hacking all of our internets! ALL OF THEM!" scene in terms of technical acumen. I'm pretty sure Sloane can do better than that, based on the rest of the book. Having that and then the actual code being something that grade school kids break for fun, with no rational excuse given as to why no-one has broken it yet was just insulting.
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Mar 3, 2014 20:15
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screenwritersblues posted:Also, is everyone just doing a random pick for what they're reading or do some of you plan it out. I just planned my reading for the rest of the year because I had so much to read and feel like this method might be the best for me. Am I the only one or are there others like me? Not really. Usually I'll finish a book, then look at my list of unread books (which is extensive) and pick whatever book or series I'm in the mood for next. Whatever mood I'm in tends to outlast a single book, so I'll occasionally get runs of military SF, or low fantasy, or nonfiction about submarine warfare, or whatever, but these aren't planned in advance. quote:
I had a business trip this month, which on the one hand sucked but on the other hand meant lots of time to read on the plane. 11. The Signal & the Noise, Nate Silver 12. Elantris, Brandon Sanderson Liked this more than Warbringer; it winds down much more satisfyingly. 13. Swords & Dark Magic: the New Sword & Sorcery, ed. Jonathan Strahan & Lou Anders (short story collection) Delicious, and it has me wanting more. I've read a lot of fantasy but relatively little of it with the feel that this collection evokes. The opening cites a number of classic authors and works that were the inspiration for it - foremost among them Vance, Moorcock, Leiber, and Howard, unsurprisingly, but relatively little in the way of modern-day influences. Maybe I should just go through the list of authors who contributed to the collection and check out their works. It is also worth noting that one of the stories, A Wizard in Wiscezan, is the only fantasy work by C.J. Cherryh I've actually enjoyed, although I wouldn't consider it one of the standout pieces of the collection. 14. The Draco Tavern, Larry Niven (short story collection) I'd read the first few stories in this before, but none of the rest. I'm not sure if I started reading this at one point and got interrupted, or came across them online or in other collections. Not his best work, I think, but it was interesting in that I've never read another SSC like it - a rapid-fire collection of extremely short stories, each one built around alien conceptions of some ethical or political topic. 15. Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey 16. Caliban's War, James S. A. Corey 17. Abaddon's Gate, James S. A. Corey I got the recommendation for these out of this thread, I think. Very tasty; if summarized in a sentence it would sound like a first contact story involving zombies (or perhaps vice versa), but like the best zombie stories it is not about the zombies but about the way humans react when faced with a crisis they are unequipped to deal with. It has a pretty open ending, too; I wonder if he's going to write more in this setting? 18. Strata, Terry Pratchett 19. The Dark Side of the Sun, Terry Pratchett Two early Pratchetts. Have to say, they haven't aged well. I think I read TDSotS once, many years ago, because it was very familiar to me; Strata was completely new. Unlike the Discworld books, I probably won't be rereading them. I would say "maybe he's just not very good at SF", but I loved the Nomes books. I think it's more that he was still finding his feet as a writer - these books predate even the first Discworld novels. 20. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett 21. The Light Fantastic, Terry Pratchett 22. Interesting Times, Terry Pratchett The first two Discworld books have aged much better, although they are still noticeably rough around the edges - it's actually reading Swords & Dark Magic that got me in the mood for a reread of the first two books. Interesting Times remains one of my favourite Rincewind books and one of the first Discworld books I read after the first two. 23. Gardens of the Moon, Steven Erikson 24. Deadhouse Gates, Steven Erikson With the Malazan Book of the Fallen series finished at last, I want to actually read the whole thing. Gardens, unfortunately, wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. It has a very schizophrenic feel, like Erikson wanted to get every single goddamn note about the setting, plot, characters, or history into the book and didn't much care that it meant the whole thing read like it'd been put through a blender. I'm not sure why I liked Gardens the first time I read it, but I'm glad I did, because Deadhouse is as good as I remember; it's much more focused and a better book for it. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 21:06
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attackbunny posted:Why do I find it so much easier to review books I didn't like? Is it because I'm secretly an awful person? Personally, I find it a lot easier to pin down why I don't like something than why I do. Case in point... 25. Memories of Ice, Steven Erikson I didn't like this book nearly as much as I did Deadhouse Gates (or its sequel House of Chains). I don't think it's actually a worse book, but it has a bunch of things I object to: - It features a lot of Kruppe, and I cannot loving stand Kruppe or his bloated, self-aggrandizing speeches. - The entire subplot with Silverfox, Mhybe, and the Tlan Imass could have been resolved in about five minutes if she'd spent those five minutes explaining her plans instead of acting secretive and paranoid; I have no patience for plots that hinge entirely on people who are able to talk to each other, but unwilling to. - I honestly cannot bring myself to give a poo poo about half the characters or the gods they worship, and most of the ones I do care about die messily at the end anyways. If I had to sum this one up, I'd say it feels like a Black Company book, except it's not as good at being one. At least it features more Quick Ben. 26. House of Chains, Steven Erikson And we're back to Malazan books I enjoy! The characters in Seven Cities and the Dryjna Rebellion interest me a lot more than the war against the Pannion Domin. 27. Collected Stories of Morlock the Maker, James Enge Not an actual book, but after reading a Morlock story in The New Sword & Sorcery I went and tracked down the rest; most of them are available online, and there's about a (short) book's worth. I'll probably read the novels soon, too, but I wanted something short and refreshing after 4000+ pages of Malaz. It's quite different from the fantasy I've been reading lately, and I really like it -- anyone have recommendations for similar books? Next will probably be the Divergent trilogy so that my wife and I can discuss it without fear of spoilers, and then the next book or two in the Malazan series. I do want to finish the entire series this year, but I don't think I could read all ten books back to back.
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Apr 22, 2014 02:21
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28. Divergent, Veronica Roth 29. Insurgent, Veronica Roth 30. Allegiant, Veronica Roth Read these after watching the movie with my wife, since we wanted to know more about the setting so we could speculate wildly about it. We were actually pleasantly surprised by a lot of it, including the author neatly avoiding some common-to-the-point-of-cliche fictional relationship failure modes. Allegiant in particular had a few parts where upon learning The Terrible Truth™ we went "wait, no, that's incredibly stupid", but it made more sense once we realized that basically everyone is either lying about the project, or have themselves been lied to, or both, so the actual objection is not "the fundamental basis of the backstory is stupid" but "these characters should have come up with better lies". 31. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde 32. Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde 33. The Well of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde 34. Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde Increasingly I find myself thinking I'm not actually going to finish the Malazan series; like Wheel of Time, I want to know how it ends but just cannot bring myself to slog through the 6000+ pages between me and that ending when I'm honestly not enjoying that much. I have so much backlog these days that mere curiosity is not enough to compel me to finish a series anymore. So I went to read the Thursday Next books instead. I'd read the first two before, the latter two were new to me. They are fun and lighthearted and a bit of a headfuck if you think about the time travel too much. All in all, good times, although Fforde needs to get off his rear end and write a sequel to Shades of Grey already; I like Thursday Next, but Chromatacia is Fforde's best work and I want more of it. 35. Freakangels & Global Frequency, Warren Ellis I like Ellis and I've had these in my backlog since Freakangels was finished years ago. I enjoyed the poo poo out of Freakangels, and it doesn't surprise me to see him citing Wyndham as an influence in the afterword (mostly The Midwich Cuckoos, obviously, although there's a bit of The Kraken Wakes in there too). Global Frequency was not nearly as good. It's basically a short story collection, but the stories are kind of repetitive and also variable in quality. I can forgive the former if there's an overarching storyline, and the latter if they're written by different authors, but there isn't and they weren't; the only unifying factor is the basic theme and the characters of Zero and Aleph, who we don't generally see much of. It actually reminded me of Planetary, but unfortunately, Planetary is much better. 36. T-Rex and the Crater of Doom, Walter Alvarez I don't normally go in for paleontology, but this was pretty interesting. What really struck me was how recent it was; when I was learning about the mass extinction and the impact that caused it in school, it was a new and exciting discovery, not, as I assumed, something that had been known for decades. I was also amazed - and dismayed - to learn of the conflict between gradualist and catastrophist geology and how badly it had set things back. Yet another we can blame James Ussher for.  37. Mogworld, Benjamin Croshaw 38. Jam, Benjamin Croshaw Mogworld was a lot of fun. I've never played WoW (which it is very clearly riffing on, right down to the cover art), and I've played very little in the way of MMOs in general, but I still do enough gaming in general to get the jokes. Jam was considerably less fun. It feels like a parody of disaster fiction, but for the most part it's not funny, just stupid. Maybe I just don't read enough disaster fiction for it to have the same effect as Mogworld, and someone who does (but does little gaming) would have the opposite reaction to the books? Unfortunately, I now have the two bugbears of "not knowing what I want to read next" and "having a newborn to take care of", so my reading is probably going to slow waaaaaay down for a while.
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May 25, 2014 15:30
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Roydrowsy posted:61. The Likes of Lock Lamora - By Scott Lynch Part of this may be that it's a good heist/con novel and those are far rarer than they should be. When I described Lies to my girlfriend and said I wanted more books like that, she had a number of recommendations that, while good, weren't at all what I was looking for. Then she read it and went "that's excellent but I now have no idea what to recommend to you as a followup". Please prove me wrong by recommending a bunch of good cons, not necessarily fantasy -- or even fiction.  Roydrowsy posted:Really consider audiobooks. They were a godsend when my son was born. Having your handsful tending to the kid, putting a book on the ipod was quite the sanity saver. More and more public libraries are offering downloadable collections which include audiobooks, so there are ways to get them rather easily. I hate audiobooks. They take way too long. I would honestly like to try to figure out how to operate my e-reader with my feet first.
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May 25, 2014 21:51
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Roydrowsy posted:Some of my favorite "heist" novels are the Donald Westlake, Dortmunder books. They're pretty clever, and have quite a bit of humor. "Drowned Hopes" "Good Behavior" or "Get Real" would all be decent books to start with. I will check out all of those. Although I was under the impression the Arsene Lupin stories were more straightforward mysteries, while I am looking for cunning and (arguably over-) complicated plots executed with panache -- think Leverage or Hustle. If I'm wrong about that I'm about to be very happy indeed.
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May 28, 2014 02:01
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39. Blood of Ambrose, James Enge 40. This Crooked Way, James Enge 41. The Wolf Age, James Enge The three Morlock the Maker novels. They all have a very different feel, and reading the afterword for This Crooked Way leads me to believe that was deliberate; each book was deliberately evoking a different type of classic fantasy literature. Overall, I think The Wolf Age is my favourite, although I enjoyed them all a great deal. Blood of Ambrose focuses more on the people around Morlock than on Morlock himself, but it's Morlock I came for. This Crooked Way is a collection of short stories woven together into a novel, and while the stories stand on their own just fine, it works less well as a coherent book; there is an overarching conflict of sorts in Morlock's attempt to restore Nimue, and Merlin's opposition, but most of the stories don't touch on this at all, so it ends up feeling like it was just kind of tossed in there for the sake of having it after most of the stories were already written. (I had also already read most of them elsewhere.) The Wolf Age suffers from neither of these flaws, although I think it would have been better had the Strange Gods been completely uninvolved; they don't really add much to the story. And arguably Morlock should have killed all of them at the end rather than just Death, since they clearly can't be trusted not to meddle disastrously in mortal affairs. In any case, I enjoyed the poo poo out of all three of them, and they also go down smooth; I started reading Blood of Ambrose on the bus into work three days ago. 42. Berserkers: The Beginning, Fred Saberhagen I finally have what I think is a complete set of Berserker short stories, and this is the first collection in that set. I had, I think, already read all of the stories in this collection. What I had not done was read them all together, or in order; in particular, there are four stories here -- The Stone Place, Masque of the Red Shift, In the Temple of Mars, and The Face of the Deep -- that are all part of the same continuing plot and should probably be read together. Previously I had reach one in a separate collection, years apart, and hadn't made the connections. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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May 31, 2014 16:07
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43. Dragon Wing, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman 44. Elven Star, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman Meh. The setting looked interesting, and it is interesting, but the rest did nothing for me. I'm trying to get better at realizing when I'm reading a book not because I'm enjoying it, but just because I'm curious about some aspect of the setting or overall plot, and the Death Gate books definitely fall into that category. 45. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson A friend of mine recommended Generation of Swine, and while I don't have that on my e-reader, I did have Fear and Loathing. The first chapter was kind of weird because it has been so extensively quoted and remixed that every line in it was familiar, but after that things got good. 46. The Wizardry Compiled, Rick Cook 47. The Wizardry Consulted, Rick Cook Old favourites, and a bit of a relaxing nostalgia trip. 48. Aluminum Sky: Journals of the Malatora Conflict, various authors This is a collection of microfiction about Terra Malatora written and collected by goons. As expected, the quality is hugely variable, but with most of the stories only a few pages long, if that, it's all over too fast to leave much of an impression, good or bad, beyond "some people are really fixated on dragon dicks". 49. Dauntless, John G. Hemry 50. Fearless, John G. Hemry 51. Courageous, John G. Hemry 52. Valiant, John G. Hemry 53. Relentless, John G. Hemry 54. Victorious, John G. Hemry I tried Hemry once before, with Stark's War, and couldn't even finish it. I decided to give him another shot with the Lost Fleet series, and I'm glad I did. On the one hand, it's fairly formulaic space opera that does nothing new or exciting with the formula, and the orbital mechanics are, at best, extremely questionable; on the other hand, I did quite enjoy it, and it need not be revolutionary to be fun. (And frankly, at this point I consider it a win if an SF author realizes that things orbit at all rather than just flying from place to place like zeppelins). My biggest complaint is that there is one major subplot -- the relationship between Geary and Desjani -- that made me want to slam my head into the wall until the blessed darkness of unconsciousness claimed me, because everyone involved is variously incredibly stupid, unbelievably childish and petulant, or both. And the fact that that subplot wraps up with Desjani playing stupid head games with Geary and Geary reacting by proposing to her rather than getting the gently caress out and seeking out a relationship with a functional adult is (a) a pretty lovely ending and (b) leads me inexorably to the conclusion that a century in cryosleep did, in fact, cause lasting brain damage. Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Spirit War was pretty good. It's book 4 of 5 from the Eli Monpress series, and it's a pretty fun, lighthearted fantasy series. Not heavy, grimdark, or just overall horribly violent, just a fun read. Wait, the fifth book is out now? Goddamn, I need to get on that. Ezzum posted:Well, I find myself in the awkward position of having already achieved my goal in the middle of the year. Guess I vastly underestimated my capacity for reading. Keep reading. If you need a goal to motivate you, see if you can hit 2x or 3x your original goal. E: beaten like a Syndicate picket force
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Jun 30, 2014 17:45
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Dienes posted:I'm so glad you posted this, I really enjoyed reading Golden Waters/Fatlantis and Game of Bones last year. Are there any other goonthologies floating around? Aluminum Sky and In Golden Waters are the only two I know about, I didn't actually know about Game of Bones until your post. There's almost certainly others, though.
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Jul 1, 2014 03:21
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64 books and thus my goal for this year hit.  55. Heavy Time by C.J. Cherryh 56. Hellburner by C.J. Cherryh 57. Rimrunners by C.J. Cherryh 58. Cuckoo's Egg by C.J. Cherryh 59. The Faded Sun: Kesrith by C.J. Cherryh 60. The Faded Sun: Shon'Jir by C.J. Cherryh 61. The Faded Sun: Kutath by C.J. Cherryh Another CJC binge! Heavy Time and Hellburner are meant to be read in sequence (and have in fact been re-released as a single volume, Devil to the Belt). They're set before the Treaty of Pell, and along with Rimrunners are (I think) the only A-U books dealing with the Earth Company/Fleet side of things. I'd read them before, but out of order and separated by years; it's nice to finally read them in order. Things make a lot more sense when you've read Heavy Time first. The rest are straightforward rereads. The Faded Sun trilogy remains some of my favourite Cherryh. 62. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman Feynman's memoirs! Quite interesting, and some of the stories remind me of my Dad's stories of his time working as a programmer on a US navy base. A lot of it is funny, but in a "ha ha holy poo poo this guy is an rear end in a top hat" way; Feynman was quite the poo poo-stirrer. 63. In Golden Waters: Stories of the Seastead by Something Awful Another Goon short story collection. I didn't like this one nearly as much as Aluminum Sky. Part of this, I think, is that doesn't have as much to work with; "floating city-state built by, and for, libertarian assholes" just can't compete with "huge underground bunker complex built by, and for, people who have transplanted their brains into giant ten-dicked cybernetic dragon bodies made of magic future aluminum". On top of that, though, the overall quality is lower, and all the worst stories are front-loaded rather than scattered randomly through the book like in AS. Furthermore, there are a lot of stories that are clearly setting something up to be continued in a later chapter that never appears; presumably the author posted the first part and then hosed off and was never seen again. And there's a few stories from the thread that I remember liking that I can't find in this collection. All in all, rather a disappointment after Aluminum Sky. Despite the author's protestations in the foreword that he wrote this not to impart any sort of mortal lesson but simply for the fun of it, he sure spends a lot of words trying to hammer each story into a moral lesson! And like Volkman's Spies, it suffers from having a lot of quantity but not much quality. 64. If Only They Could Talk by James Herriot 65. It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet by James Herriot 66. Let Sleeping Vets Lie by James Herriot 67. Vet in Harness by James Herriot 68. Vets Might Fly by James Herriot 69. Vet in a Spin by James Herriot US readers may know these better as the omnibus editions All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Wise and Wonderful and All Things Bright and Beautiful. These are stories about rural veterinary practice in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1940s, and are mostly autobiographical -- with names changed to protect the guilty, and some embellishment. These too are rereads, but it's been over a decade since I read them last. In the intervening decade I've married one woman who grew up on a farm, and dated another; this has let me soak up some knowledge about farming and given me an even greater appreciation for them.
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Sep 1, 2014 01:19
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Groke posted:Man, I read a bunch of those when I was a wee lad, 30 years ago or more. Remember them as being pretty great (also I grew up on a farm myself). They're still pretty great. I keep trying to convince my wife to read them, but her reading list is ridiculously long and she doesn't have a lot of time for reading at the moment.
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Sep 3, 2014 22:44
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thespaceinvader posted:65: Red Seas Under Red Skies. Not much to say about this as it's a reread, but again it was as good as I remembered it being, which is pretty darn good, and there's more intriguing and disturbing worldbuilding than I remembered, which is also good (the Parlour Passage, for instance, hit just the right level of WTF creepy for me). My biggest complaint about RSURS is that it felt like it wanted to be two books and ended up as two half-books awkwardly spliced together. I would have loved to have read Locke And Jean On The High Seas and Locke And Jean Rob A Casino as separate books, but as it is it felt like neither plot really got the time it deserved.
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Oct 20, 2014 04:22
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70. Conqueror's Pride by Timothy Zahn 71. Conqueror's Heritage by Timothy Zahn 72. Conqueror's Legacy by Timothy Zahn More Zahn rereads. I had forgotten how the viewpoint flips around; the first book is written from the perspective of the humans, the second from that of the "conquerors", and the third from both. It works pretty well. 73. Dragon and Thief by Timothy Zahn 74. Dragon and Soldier by Timothy Zahn 75. Dragon and Slave by Timothy Zahn 76. Dragon and Herdsman by Timothy Zahn 77. Dragon and Judge by Timothy Zahn 78. Dragon and Liberator by Timothy Zahn Not rereads. When I first saw these I went "huh, I didn't know Zahn did any fantasy". Turns out he doesn't; the "dragon" is an alien symbiote that bonds to the protagonist after being shot down by space pirates. YA, so they're uncomplicated and go by really quickly, but are pretty much typical Zahn: not groundbreaking, but fun. 79. Most Secret War by Victor Jones US readers may know this as The Wizard War. Nonfiction about signals intelligence and the development of radar and ECM during WW2, written by the physicist who was ADI (Science) during the war and directed much of the British EW and SIGINT work. A fascinating read; I picked this up mostly for the chapters on the Battle of the Beams, but it is well worth reading the whole thing. This one goes next to Ignition on my shelf, I think. 80. Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear Short story collection. Very eclectic; we've got Norse myth, postcyberpunk murder mysteries, Lovecraft, urban fantasy, and more, often all in the same story. Possibly as a result it was extremely hit and miss for me, but the hits were good enough that I'll be checking out her novels as well. 81. The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook The best way I can describe this is that it's Warhammer 40,000 with all the stupid parts filed off, and the resulting nub then grown back out until it can support a full story. Keeping track of the various people and planets and the passage of time can be a full-time job, though. 82. The Swordbearer by Glen Cook I enjoyed it while reading it, but it honestly didn't leave much of an impression on me. 83. Devices and Desires by K.J. Parker 84. Evil for Evil by K.J. Parker These were recommended to me by a friend who I increasingly suspect has fundamentally incompatible tastes in books. On the surface, these look up my alley. Parker's writing isn't awe-inspiring but is always at least competent, and I am a big fan both of intricate plots of revenge and of characters exiled to an alien culture who must then figure out how to survive in it, which this trilogy has in spades. Unfortunately, the good guys, such as they are, are all idiots. I've mentioned earlier in this thread that I have a distaste for plots that hinge entirely on characters who can talk to each other refusing to; these books have loads of that and the characters in question have some kind of severe brain damage. The love triangle, such as it is, is only the tip of the iceberg. So, on the side of the angels we have a bunch of well-meaning fools who are constantly at odds with one another due to an inability to behave like functional adults. What are they up against? A superintelligent, innovative, supernaturally lucky, sociopathic mass murderer. Welp. (Halfway through the book he gets a sidekick, an equally intelligent and innovative but rather less lucky serial rapist.) If you think the odds look a bit stacked here, they are, and the end result is that the first two books basically consist of the barely likeable characters getting their lives constantly and thoroughly destroyed by the completely unlikeable characters (while praising the latter as their saviours because they've been decieved and mainpulated that thoroughly). It's a bit like watching someone upend a bucket of deformed but still lovable kittens into an industrial blender. It's really unpleasant even if (as I often did while reading these books) you wish all the idiots would just die already. It's made all the worse because you can usually see it coming. Why? Because much of the books are actually written from the perspective of the villain. Now, in general, I don't have a problem with this. I like a story from the point of view of a complex, multifaceted, somewhat sympathetic bad guy. I like it even more when it's ambiguous who the bad guys are, or if anyone can even be called "the bad guys". The problem here is that the villain in question is kind of unbelievable and totally unsympathetic. If this were, say, a thriller about a serial killer, it would be one that spends a chapter on the police as they investigate clues (and end up arresting the wrong guy because the real killer has cunningly framed them), and then three chapters watching over the killer's shoulder in loving detail as he tortures his next victim. It's more than a little squicky. Further complicating matters is that the books are structured around the villain in a way that initially encourages thinking of him as the protagonist. This creates some serious dissonance as you learn more about him and become increasingly unwilling to cheer him on or even watch him work at all. I'm not sure if this was a deliberate thematic choice (in which case, well done, but it makes the books really loving unpleasant to read), or if Parker actually thinks this character is the protagonist and expects the reader to take their side (in which case that's horrifying and makes me wonder how many dismembered corpses the author has in their freezer). 85. Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear I liked this more than the stories in Shoggoths in Bloom that I disliked but less than the ones I liked. Part of this is that I was expecting more Promeathean shenanigans and less Faerie politics. Good, but not what I wanted to read. Now reading: A Shadow of All Night Falling by Glen Cook I've tried Cook's Dread Empire books at least twice before and bounced off each time, but I've enjoyed his other work so much this year and last that I figured I'd give them another try.
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Nov 13, 2014 15:44
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86. A Shadow of All Night Falling by Glen Cook 87. October's Baby by Glen Cook 88. All Darkness Met by Glen Cook These are some of Cook's earlier works, and it shows. They don't read as well as The Black Company, and it's harder to get a handle on the plot or the characters. Close attention is absolutely required, as plot-critical characters, places, and events will be mentioned in passing and then not referred to again until half a book later, and time will skip forward or backwards years, decades, or centuries at a time with the only warning of this being the date in the chapter heading. They also feel very detached, for lack of a better word; the best way I can describe it is that it feels like it wants to be a history more than a story. This doesn't help. 89. Berserker Base by Fred Saberhagen Meh. I like the Berserkers setting, but IMO, Saberhagen isn't that good a writer -- he's an ideaman, like Niven or PKD. And like those two he's at his best writing short stories. This is a collection of four novellas loosely stitched together with a frame story; I greatly preferred the short story collection I read earlier this year. I've also come to the conclusion that I like Laumer's Bolos more, I think. Groke posted:Oh, I know Brust is great - one of my favourite authors since I discovered him whenever it was in the early 1990s. Just somehow haven't gotten around to reading anything he's published since... (Checks) ...2004, I guess. This is the kind of stuff that happens as you get older, turn around and a decade has somehow passed. So, seemed like a good time for a series reread. Brust owns but I haven't been reading his stuff since, IIRC, Orca because I want him to finish the series first. Maybe I should reread the Khaavren Romances to take the edge off. That sounds like a good idea. Thanks, reading challenge thread.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:38
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Strong Mouse posted:Jhereg, Yendi, Taltos, and Teckla Steven Brust - The first four books in the Vlad Taltos series. These books are all really good. They're short enough to finish in a couple sittings, and each one can pretty much stand on its own. The books are not written in chronological order, so you can see some call-backs as well as him setting up things in books that have happened in the future. This series is also really good at switching genre. Each book is different from the previous. If you liked those, definitely check out the prequels, The Khaavren Romances -- he goes Full Dumas for a while and it's great. I'm rereading them right now and I'd forgotten how funny they were.
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Dec 25, 2014 21:42
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Groke posted:Those own so hard they made me read the original musketeers series (all of it), which also owned in all its glorious longwindedness. Those are actually next on the list after I finish rereading the Khaavren books, for the same reason. I've read The Count of Monte Cristo, but never any other Dumas.
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Dec 28, 2014 18:57
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I could probably finish The Paths of the Dead before midnight, but I'm not going to, so calling it for 2014. Final score: 92/64. Not taking the bus to work cut out a lot of reading time, but meant I could spend more time at home; having a kid meant I was a lot busier, but actually increased my reading time in some ways because I can plausibly read while holding a baby in one arm, while I can't do many other things that I might otherwise have done instead of reading. 90. Cowboy Feng's Space Bar & Grille by Steven Brust Not nearly as good as I remembered it. I like unreliable narrators but it wasn't used to nearly as great effect as it could have been. His Draegara books are much better. 91. The Phoenix Guards by Steven Brust 92. Five Hundred Years After by Steven Brust The first two books of The Khaavren Romances, a five-book prequel trilogy to his Vlad Taltos series heavily inspired by (and to some extent parodying) Dumas's d'Artagnan Romances, including an excessively verbose and circuitous literary style. The frame story -- a historian turning some of his notes on a planned N-volume treatise on events leading up to and immediately following* Adron's Disaster into a series of pop-history novels -- lets the narrator digress in ways that would be out of place in the Vlad books but works brilliantly here. I remembered liking them, what I hadn't remembered was how funny they are. * i.e. no more than 500 years before or after it, more or less
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Jan 1, 2015 02:17
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