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Put me down for 52 again. I am not afraid! Goodreads
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Jan 2, 2014 06:55
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:37 |
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Books books books. 1 - 3. The Skinner, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, and Orbus by Neal Asher. His Spatterjay trilogy. Prador Moon is basically a prerequisite. I found them as good, if not better than his Agent Cormack novels. The Spatterjay ecosystem is loving great.
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Feb 4, 2014 10:58
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4. Twenty Palaces by Harry Connolly is a shortish prequel that, while a fun read, didn't grip me as much as the rest of the trilogy. 5. Fire Watch by Connie Willis 6. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis 7. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis 8. Blackout by Connie Willis 9. All Clear by Connie Willis I have a strong admiration for Connie Willis, but very mixed feelings about these books that make up her Oxford Time Travel series. Fire Watch, a collection of short stories, was unsurprisingly hit and miss. The time travel story in it was not my favorite part of the collection. The Doomsday book, I thought, was a mildly interesting story about a bland pandemic mashed into a fantastic story about the black death. To Say Nothing of the Dog was a fun, but mostly frivolous Poirot time-travel mystery in an English manor. Blackout and All Clear focused on the Blitz, and need to be read together. The first book is mostly setup for the faster paced finale. At their best, they're heartwrenching tales of struggle through disaster. At their worst, they're mildly interesting stories propped up by a frankly astonishing level of detail and research. Also, Connie Willis has an enormous hardon for old cathedrals and churches. 10. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie was a simple sci-fi story elevated into an excellent novel via an interesting main character with an unconventional narrative point of view. Anne also explores some interesting ground with gender pronouns, though not particularily deeply. I found, with Connie Willis, that I can easily point to parts of each of her books that were bland, boring, or plodding. Despite that, I still devoured them at a breakneck pace, and ultimately couldn't put them down. Hence the mixed feelings.
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Mar 4, 2014 23:46
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11-13. Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, Emperor of Thorns by Mark Lawrence. I'd been putting this trilogy off for a while now, as the reviews and chatter I've read have been fairly mixed. People seem to either love it for it's gritty, grimdarkness and morally grey characters, or hate it for it's gritty, grimdark, morally reprehensible characters. I hate to pull a South Park, but I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I enjoyed the entire trilogy quite a bit, as a whole. Unsympathetic characters and actions don't offend me, and the world the story occupies is interesting, well written, and fascinatingly revealed. I feel the quality of the third book made the initial two more tolerable. By the end, the buildup and development of the setting was enough to carry me through. On the other hand, there was basically no characterization apart from the protagonist. The protagonist himself was an arrogant, merciless, murderous ubermensch who is exceedingly cunning and clever, a tactical genius, an expert swordsman, and a brutal warlord. To top it all off, he begins his journey of being the best at everything ever at 14 years old. He finishes the trilogy around 20 years old, which is still about 2 years shy of the way his character speaks and acts for the entire tale. Suspending disbelief to read about an unlikable, irredeemable shithead who's the best at everything is difficult enough without constantly being reminded that he's 14 years old. It's the same feeling as watching precocious children in movies read dialogue written by adults. Only in this case, the child actor is also commiting a good amount of rape and murder. 14. The Women and the Warlords by Hugh Cook For some reason, my feelings at the end of the Thorns books reminded me to keep reading Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. I remember the first books in the series were poorly paced stories filled with really interesting and creative scenes playing with traditional fantasy elements. I also remembered a lot of well written characters with complex realistic motivations, and a grim setting detailed with a wry sense of humour. This book was lacked the majority of the humour, but maintained the other good stuff with a better pacing. I liked this book very much, though I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it. The events detailed were not particularily pleasant. It followed the struggle for survival of a woman slave in a horrifically oppressive male dominated fantasy society. Thorns and this book had similar elements in their worlds, but the main difference to me lies in their portrayal. Hugh Cook's holds nothing back in his depictions of the terrible abuse women face in "gritty" male dominated fantasy worlds, and the effect is feelings of hopelessness and depression, in spite of the protagonist's successes. Thorns depictions of brutality, violence, and oppression are typically small asides, matter-of-fact statements, or scenes built for shock value. (All of which are fairly typical in "gritty" fantasy.) Thorns says "Look at the horrible things our badass morally grey hero does!", while Cook shows what a society filled with these events would do to the people who inhabit it, from the point of view of someone struggling to free themselves from their yoke. Mark Lawrence throws in violence and oppresion to shock people and make his hero seem more of a brutal badass. His work tries too hard to be grimdark. Hugh Cook is a more thoughtful writer who is better at showing than telling, and actually has something important to say. His story was just grim. 15. The Walrus and the Warwolf by Hugh Cook. This was my favorite book this month, and I'm going to write the least about it. It's a non-stop, breakneck paced, swashbuckling adventure story. It reminded me a lot of Jack Vance's Cudgel's Saga in both character and plot. The arrogant, clever protagonist pinballs from place to place, misadventure to misadventure, constantly witting his way into and out of dangerous situations and misunderstanding. The story is full of wit and humour, and occasionally pokes some fun at organized religion and cult behaviour. Unlike Thorns protagonist, this hero has fatal flaws and grows as a person. It's fun, it's exciting. It's great fun and excitement. This book, and internet reading afterwords, made me understand that each of Hugh Cook's novels takes place from the point of view of a different character in in the same world and same 30 year time span. The characters cross paths with each other constantly, and each new book/viewpoint can completely change the reader's understanding of a character or series of events. It also fully revealed the post-apocalyptic nature of the setting, as characters stumble across ancient magic/technological artifacts that they misunderstand and screw up. Not a dying earth, but similar in feel to Gene Wolf and Jack Vance. I'm worried I may have hit the high point of the series. Too many words for only 5 books.
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Apr 1, 2014 06:07
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After hitting a natural breakpoint in Hugh Cook's work I dug into a bunch of other books I'd been meaning to read for a while. 16. The Wicked and the Witless by Hugh Cook was another great entry that painted some events in his previous novels in an entirely different light. Lighter on the commentary than normal, it was more of a fun adventure story with a hapless protagonist bounced from situation to situation beyond his control. Given the portrayal of the protagonist in the previous novels, The Wicked has some fun things to say about public image and political manipulation. 17. Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack is a story told as a series of diary entries by a young teenage girl as an economic collapse leads to class warfare, societal breakdown, and the disintegration of her entire world. It's bleak and depressing; It's a great book, and a fantastic bummer. 18. Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer was another great book. Like the rest of his work, Annihilation evokes strong feelings of oppressive paranoia, mystery, eeriness, and creeping unease and dread. This tone, I've found, is unique to Vandermeer and I love it. 19. The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett. I broke my excellent-book-streak with this one, unfortunately. I liked the first three quarters of this one quite a lot. It gave me strong, early-wheel-of-time vibes, and sucked me in with an intruiging setting. The coming of age/origin stories of the three protagonists were interesting, even if the prose was fairly simple and a little bit bland. I'm gonna spoil stuff now. 60 pages from the end of the book, everything fell apart. The three protagonists, who were obviously going to meet up at some point to form their adventuring party of Ranger-Sage-Monk, Healer, and Bard, meet. Their dialogue is terrible, consisting of mostly blunt personal statements of their morals and goals. Perhaps the dialogue was always terrible, but this could be forgiven when the characters were stubborn, arrogant children. As adults, everything feels off. This is my minor complaint. My major complaint involves the story taking an enormous misogynist poo poo all over itself. Brett wants to be GRR Martin with his grim world of violence and rape, but he learned all the wrong lessons. 40 pages from the end of the book the "strong female protagonist", a 27 year old virgin, gets gang-raped by bandits while the weak male protagonist watches. Two days later, after being rescued by the strong male protagonist, the virgin gang-rape survivor jumps directly onto her rescuer's dick. During their terrible sex scene she thinks about how hard she wants to please him, wishes she was still a virgin so she could give herself to him, and tells the man she met the eve of her gang-rape that she hopes he makes her pregnant. She'd been written decently up until this point. It's not a one-off character mistake, as her character spends the rest of her time thinking about her man as the climactic battle rages. I hear the sequels only get worse, so I'm done with this series unless I get my morbid curiousity up. Read the origin story parts, then throw the book in a goddamn fire. 20. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin was a pleasant way to wash the taste out of my mouth. It's pleasant and engrossing, dealing with dark subject matter while not being grim and gritty. It's an intruiging, gods-and-magic filled fantasy novel with a well written lady point of view character. It's also got a goodly amount of mystical romance and god-loving, which can be fun.
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May 3, 2014 11:01
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CestMoi posted:4) The Man Who Was "Thursday", A Nightmare: by G. K. Chesterton - Didn't expect smething so close to a thriller from a book written in the 1800s. Leaves a lot of questions unanswered but overall a good read, I'd certainly recommend it, particularly since it's only 150 pages. Might I give you a recommendation? Based on your list so far I think you'd really enjoy reading the audiobook of The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton, as read by Ron Keith on audible.com. It shares a lot of themes with the books already on your list. My List: 21-24. Swords and Deviltry, Swords Against Death, Swords in the Mist, and Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber are collections of short stories and tales written between 1938 and 1988. They're fantastic, uncynical and earnest adventure stories with fantasy protagonists who act like real human beings (albeit larger than life ones). 25. Authority by Jeff Vandermeer is the second part of his current creepy and weird series. This one had a different style to it, but I like it as much as I did the first one. The feeling I get from Vandermeer's books is a feeling I can get nowhere else. 26. Skin Game by Jim Butcher was, as expected, another action packed Dresden novel. Pretty great, though I wonder how much of my enjoyment is propped up by the vast amount of previously established lore holding the series aloft. 27. The Crimson Campaign by Brain McClellan. I really enjoyed his first novel, and I liked this one even more. Gritty and exciting, with some pretty nifty magic poo poo flying around with all the musketballs. 28. The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell was interesting. It took me some time to get into it, but I enjoyed it a lot by the end. This might be the most British book I've ever read. Paul's occult london is pretty hosed up, and Neil Gaiman is a character in it. That's just crazy. For my next book, I think I might read The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton. I've heard some pretty good things, but need to figure out which version to pick up.
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Jun 13, 2014 00:48
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I forgot to update in June, so here's two month's worth of bookreading. 29 - 31. The Swords of Lankhmar, Swords and Ice Magic, and The Knight and Knave of Swords by Fritz Leiber finished off the series. Book 5, The Swordsof Lankhmar, was great. While the others in the series were collections of short stories, book 5 was a singular tale and was better for it. The final two collections followed a similar strategy but, unfortunately, were less interesting in their telling. I found Leiber's attempt to ease his heroes into retirement was generally uninteresting, and the series ended with a whimper. 32. The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon surprised me. The jacket descriptions did not make it sound like a novel I'd like to read, but it was ultimately pretty fantastic. While generally straightforward and clear, Chabon's prose occasionally veers into wonderfully succinct poetry. I just wish I had baseline understanding of Yiddish, as his use of Yiddish slang (which I had to look up) was wry and humourous. Sholem (Peace) instead of gun, and Shofar (Horn) for phone were two notably fitting examples. Pretty great. 33. Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy by Harry Connolly was a short story collection from the Twenty Palaces author. It's a mix of experimental fantasy writing and Twenty Palaces tales from various times in his career. While not all fantastic, I can't think of a single story that I didn't like. The proto-Twenty-Palaces short was particularily great, and it was fun to read fantasy writing in Connolly's voice. 34. The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross was more of what I'd come to expect from the Laundry Files. So, pretty fun. 35. Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky was imaginative and bleak. And also great. It's been a great month. 36. Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone surprised me with his urban tale of lawyer liches arguing contract law over the recently deceased body of a fire god. I liked it. 37. Crack'd Pot Trail by Steven Erikson advertised itself as a novella featuring the authors favorite vile necromancers. What it delivered was an unsubtle, biting satire and examination of the relationship between artist, art, and audience. It was great, but not in the way I expected. In the novella, a dimwitted audience expects and demands specific things from the artists in their caravan, devouring them for dinner should they not deliver. Some reviewers of Crack'd Pot Trail absolutey hated it for not being Malazan enough, inadvertently making Erikson's point for him.
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Jul 29, 2014 09:14
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:37 |
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Groke posted:No, wait, Fritz Leiber didn't use either in the Lankhmar stories, as far as I can remember. Doubtless other exceptions also exist. In "Adept's Gambit" Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser go through a wizard portal to Macedonia where they kiss pigs and chat about Socrates.
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Aug 29, 2014 11:55
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