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Captain Candyblood posted:It annoys me whenever writers include exact weight/height/clothing measurements in their stories, it's never not weird. Unnecessary and boring to read too. Why would you write down your character's medical chart instead of describing them with, you know...descriptive language. Perfect timing! I've become enchanted with all the dumb stuff you can read with the Kindle's monthly subscription - mostly laughably terrible short horror stories, but some that show a bit of promise. My most recent discovery is the suspiciously-named Jon Athan, who falls mainly in the former category and whose primary defining characteristic is introducing every character with, well, uh: "40-year-old Jacob Barrens stood six-one with a strapping physique" "The dark-skinned police officer stood six-one with a bald dome and burly physique" "He stood six-one with a lean figure" "Randall Fox stood six-two with a burly physique" "Andrew Rosenberg stood six-one with a lean physique" "Sylvester stood six-three with a lanky figure" "Michael Martinz stood six-one with a sturdy physique" "55-year-old Carl Caldwell stood five-eight with a feeble figure" "Marcus stood five-eleven with a strapping physique" "58-year-old Robert stood five-eleven with a frail figure" "Shawn Lake stood five-eleven with a lean but muscular figure" "Bertha stood five-five, five-eight with her sleek black high heels" "His body shriveled to a five-five stature with a timorous posture" (!) "A frail old man standing five-five" "She stood five-five with a slender figure" "He stood five-ten with a scrawny physique" "Victor Barton stood five-five with a pusillanimous posture" "Harrison Cassidy stood five-eleven with a strapping physique" This is where I got tired of typing, but a quick search showed over a dozen more. Out of just a randomly-chosen book with ten short stories.
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Nov 3, 2016 01:40
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razorrozar posted:it wasn't a fanfic but i did do a paper that was essentially a literary analysis of Ocarina of Time I did a paper analyzing Star Trek: First Contact as an extension of Gothic Literature tropes. That whole Gothic Lit class was fun, just all sorts of fun reading stuff that was usually either good or very terrible.
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Jan 11, 2020 17:26
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Don Gato posted:The silmarillion was a loving trip though, it took me ages to get into it but it sucked me right in once I got that it wasn't one story like the Hobbit was. Agreed, with the caveat of also mostly ignoring the sections that are just genealogies and such, which I guess are good as background flavor but not so much to read. (opinions to be taken with a large grain of salt, as I was interested enough to get through that massive 10+ volume set of resurrected Tolkien writing during a summer of morning and evening college classes with nothing between :sweatdrop)
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Feb 22, 2020 17:36
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Mokinokaro posted:Brooks' Word & Void trilogy is honestly a decent read. Just don't read the set that turns it into a Shannara prequel. I've read this, I thought it was pretty good overall but it inadvertently shoots itself in the foot in a pretty entertaining way. The first book was set in the US in 1997, with the second set in 2002 and the third in 2012. However, they were all written pre-2000, so the world never evolves beyond the late '90s. The second book has some odd bits that feel out of place in a US that would've still been close to 9/11, but it's super noticeable by the third one, where the world never underwent the surge in cellphone and then smartphone popularity. Like, there's a bit where the power and phone are cut from a character's house and they just deal with the inconvenience because nobody in fictional 2012 is carrying even an old Nokia brick or anything.
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Feb 5, 2021 00:56
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Kchama posted:That sounds more like a Phantasm reference. It might be a cross reference, but they're specifically called Sneetches (which I'm only just now realizing isn't quite the same name as in Harry Potter). They're also exploding weapons, I can't remember if they also have blades.
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Oct 16, 2021 19:34
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I forgot the name was the same, but that was one of my favorite Dr Seuss stories as a kid. Since it wasn't full of creepy surreal poo poo like disembodied pants walking through scary woods at night 
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Oct 16, 2021 21:25
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:John Updike, according to reputation. What's Updike?
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Oct 22, 2021 19:18
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I know it's come up here before, but I read The Wise Man's Fear not too long ago, and god....the whole section where the main character wanders into the fae world and instantly goes from virgin to the greatest gently caress god the fairy queen has ever known its one of the cringiest things I've read. I was mostly rereading those books out of curiosity after having a discussion about problematic elements in them, and they're very mixed. There are some things I like in them, but there are definitely tons of issues, and that's either the worst or at least the most embarrassing.
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Oct 22, 2021 23:05
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Man the last two spoilers I've clicked on have been incest I think I'm gonna stop clicking on spoilers
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Oct 29, 2021 21:10
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Legitimately disappointed that's not on audible so I can delight in the narrator's pain
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Oct 31, 2021 19:07
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You can either be an author or a sane person, you can only choose one
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Nov 1, 2021 04:49
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Nov 15, 2021 20:40
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When even a crazy bizarro author only confirms the content of your book rather than the quality
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Nov 16, 2021 20:53
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Yeah "airport thriller" is a pretty prefect description for Lincoln Child, I think they're pretty much all readable but nothing you'll ever write home about. Also I was so busy laughing at the name that it took me a bit to register the real lol
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Nov 26, 2021 19:47
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grittyreboot posted:So I'm about 50 pages into Ready Player Two and poo poo this book is boring. To drat Cline with faint praise, his other two books had a certain momentum to their narratives. They were fun in the way a bad movie is fun.  You've gotta get the actual link to the image URL with a specific file extension, either by right clicking from a computer or long-pressing from a phone browser to see the image itself. Naturally imgur makes it needlessly obtuse to actually get to the images it hosts as an image-hosting platform. Also, lol
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Mar 11, 2022 03:08
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Jokerpilled Drudge posted:Just dragged Dan Simmons's Illium across the finish line and dear god this book loving sucks. Some of the more memorable parts I thought I'd recognized the author's name, I read Song of Kali by him ages ago. It's....about what you'd expect for a white dude writing about a white dude traveling to India and uncovering mysteries about a secret death cult, especially being written back in the 80s. Which is to say, don't bother with it.
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Mar 12, 2022 15:15
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The left half got me towards the end, and even that did not prepare me for the right half 
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Mar 21, 2022 20:51
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PJOmega posted:I hit "Turner Diaries" and knew this was going to be a shitshow. Yipes, I did not recognize that reference. Yeah, that's a real "I'm out" moment if you know what it is.
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Mar 21, 2022 21:32
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I've read some short stories where I thought second person narration worked very well at setting a specific mood. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if it was in a full novel. I might like it, but it also feels like something that takes a bit more work to get through compared to other more common writing styles.
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Apr 1, 2022 15:47
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I've played enough D&D/other narrative games that I'm perfectly fine with it as a presentation method, I think what happens for me is that it adds another level of processing for my brain in that I'm now at least somewhat imagining myself in the story's context instead of just taking it in. It can be great, but it feels like it could get more tiring after a while.
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Apr 2, 2022 01:38
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In a weird callback to earlier chat, I randomly picked up Hyperion the other day, then this morning I looked at the author's name and went wait a minute... I liked the first story within it, it was an interesting level of weird and then it just went for it right at the end. But looking at the chat from earlier it sounds like I should probably just finish this book and ignore the rest of the series?
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Apr 10, 2022 18:17
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Well, I liked Hyperion overall. The structure was really neat, a framing story uniting multiple characters interspersed with them telling the story of what brought them there, and most of those stories were decent to get good. But a couple of the stories dive straight into the recent thread topic of unnecessary sex scenes. They're very different stories but they could both be mostly described as "male protagonist meta the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, and they have sex every time they meet, and it's the best sex he's ever had every time". The second one in particular is a good story, but it just feels like it's constantly being interrupted. Like dude, it feels kinda silly when your characters just have to bone down when they're scuba diving 150 feet underwater, just stick to the interesting part of the story.
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Apr 12, 2022 19:14
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Qwertycoatl posted:Don't forget the segment where he goes to train with the sex ninjas who gently caress so constantly that they haven't made the connection between sex and babies Lol, I forgot that was from the same book. It's great that there's a big enough section full of laughably off-putting sex scenes that it completely overshadows a whole later section of laughably off-putting sex scenes
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Apr 17, 2022 17:54
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More fun unnecessary sex stuff courtesy of Dan Simmons! I'm 2/3 through The Terror and it's 95% good fun, kind of an eerie, claustrophobic story about a couple boat crews trying to survive a failed expedition in the remote arctic. But that other 5%! You get flashback interludes spending paragraphs gushing over a teenager's body and how many people she's sleeping with on a ship, with a character becoming obsessed with her as a "15-year-old temptress" And then there's the flashbacks to his usual setup of the most beautiful woman ever being there to give the plot-relevant male character the best sex he's ever had. And now a character has wandered into meeting a handful of native folks out in the Arctic wastes. Naturally, their bonding moment is ripping the top off one of the women as a gag, with Dan Simmons there to helpfully let us know how astonishingly large her breasts are "for one so young". It's like he gave himself the perfect story setup to not put in his pervy old fantasy author poo poo, and then just went "nope, well that just won't do!". gently caress you, Dan Simmons, I think I'm just done with you!
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Apr 20, 2022 01:24
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BaldDwarfOnPCP posted:It's like you're talking about a different show. Was that the tv adaptation? I'd believe it. They're sitting around in a boat being crunched up by ice shelves for years on end, that rum's not gonna last forever!
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Apr 20, 2022 04:20
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BaldDwarfOnPCP posted:Oh, I'm so sorry I didn't realize I was in the bad book thread. Haha no worries. I was actually wanting to check out the show anyway because the core setup was that interesting, regardless of whatever got changed along the way.
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Apr 20, 2022 04:40
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So I went back on my previous Dan Simmons post and dived back in for one more when I saw that he'd written another historical novel, The Abominable. It actually mostly manages to sidestep the specific gripes with him I complained about earlier, but I really need to talk about it somewhere because what it does instead is go to some real places. The early and midsections of the book are actually pretty decent, an ostensible memoir about a guy involved with a small group that was one of the earliest western attempts to conquer Mt. Everest back in the 1920s. But what bugged me for a while was the title clearly placing it in the context of The Terror's mix of natural and supernatural horror, whereas this book is almost exclusively concerned with the real-life concerns of dangerous mountain expeditions up to this point. While it briefly alludes to the yeti mythos early on, nothing comes of it for most of the book. Until the 2/3 point, when it suddenly tries to set up the idea that yetis attacked and killed a bunch of the expedition's Sherpa crew, only to reveal within about 20 pages that there was no supernatural element, it was all just badguys with guns and monster suits trying to kill or scare off that group. But that's not the wild part. In the last ~20% of the story, it's suddenly revealed that the entire expedition was secretly an orchestrated sham to get to a dead guy way up near the top of Everest, who had incriminating photos in his pocket of up-and-coming politician Adolph Hitler having sex with young boys. And there's a bunch of proto-nazis chasing the group up the mountain, culminating in an armed fight somewhere up above 28,000 feet before the heroes win. And then the protagonist gradually makes his way back down and eventually gets to England to turn in the photos to a 1920s Winston Churchill. And also, T. E. Lawrence is there, and so is Charles Chaplin, who gives a funny performance for the group. And then it just kind of winds down with a hand-wavey early WWII history saying that the photos' blackmail potential was the whole reason Germany didn't invade Great Britain? Just......WHAT? What did I read? Did I dream the whole thing? This feels like it's beyond a  response, it needs a full on 
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Apr 28, 2022 22:28
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Ambitious Spider posted:It's been a while but doesn't he do the winky "So, it was just guys in monster suits...Or was it?!" There might be a bit of a wink, but there's definitely people doing a lot of it (unfortunately I actually do a lot of these as audiobooks due to insomnia, so I'll occasionally zone out to miss some specific details, and it's much tougher to go back and check for a specific detail in the text)
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Apr 28, 2022 23:58
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Oh hi, thread, good to have you back. I've been continuing to amuse myself with lots of short story collections, the kind that show up on kindle unlimited because nobody's actually going to pay for them. It's always nice to find some gems mixed in, but I'm also entertained by all the terrible writing that's out there and seeing commonalities between bad authors. Horror is my favorite, one of the things I see is that a lot of these authors seem to think that having the idea of a scary thing or surprise twist is enough, you don't have to explain or justify it. I think this mostly spawns from reddit nosleep-style short horror communities, but so many of them do this. One of my current favorites is a story focused on a character who takes their dog out for a run. The dog gets away, but they can still hear its collar jingling, so they start jogging after it. Then things get weird, the whole forest trail they're on starts turning into this long, unending maze that seems to be trapping them in, but they can still hear the dog collar up ahead so they keep going and trying to figure out what's happening. But then suddenly, on the last page, someone runs up behind them and stabs them to death - it was an unmentioned serial killer who murdered the dog offscreen at the beginning and was running along holding its dog collar to lure the main character the whole time! What about that whole mysteriously changing location that was being set up as the central plot? gently caress you, it was a serial killer story all along! 
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Mar 31, 2023 19:15
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Carthag Tuek posted:i mean if the serial killer can teleport, it stands to reason they can alter the landscape as well Honestly, there might be a good story there. By someone else.
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Mar 31, 2023 20:54
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muscles like this! posted:I tried reading that book but had to dip out when the main character, who body hops whenever time resets, is in the body of an overweight guy and the whole thing becomes just about how gross the fat guy is and how awful it is to be fat and just goes way over the top. Lol, somehow this was the comment that made me remember that I actually had read that book. Not the neat overall premise, just a fat guy being fat. Back in bad books land, another thing that's been entertaining me through multiple authors is nonsensical geography. I read one story about aliens stalking people trapped in a snowstorm. The funny part was that the book was set in Indiana, and this crippling snowstorm (specifically the worst Indiana had seen in centuries) was supposed to amount to...six to eight inches. AKA a normal snowstorm you could see there in any given winter. And some of the characters were also in the area to stay at a cabin in the mountains for their yearly ski trip. Indiana has hills, not mountains. They're nice, but the author treated this like it was way up somewhere in the Rockies instead of the corn belt. It really made me think they had somewhere else in mind, and just put Indiana in instead for some unknown reason. Another one I read after that involved the characters needing to drive from Montana to Illinois for some deadline. Somehow, without any reason given, they wound up in Texas along the way. You know, just a day-long detour for no particular reason? The story eventually turned out to be about the characters being dead all along and journeying to their final resting place or something, I was sure there was going to be a plot point about the geography going all surreal because of that. But nope, it was never relevant to anything at all. The author just put Texas in there as if it were somewhere you'd naturally arrive at between Montana and Illinois, without any mention of detours or extra travel time. I love it.
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Apr 2, 2023 20:03
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Antivehicular posted:Were these written by Britons, because I am getting some strong "British people who have heard of certain US states" vibes Interesting, the first author isn't from the US but moved here at some point, so who knows what their actual experience is. The other one I lost track of the title, so no idea where the author's from.
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Apr 3, 2023 02:13
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That's funny, and I was just thinking about it after my US examples. I've read tons of books set in the UK too and just assumed the author knew what they were doing, but they're probably slipping dumb stuff by me left and right.
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Apr 3, 2023 17:02
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I was thinking about book recommendations today and got to wondering, are there particular things you see before starting a book and just instantly feel like you're heading for some terrible writing? I was browsing horror novels and saw one publisher summary that started with "Based on the Reddit sensation". I think that's it for me, I did the in-app equivalent of  and got outta there. I know it's not a sure thing, but I've read so many short horror stories that are spawned from r/nosleep and such, and 95% of them fall into the same lazy, illogical nonsense around a half-baked premise, and are mostly entertaining because of their badness. I don't think I have the heart to give it a try when it's a full-length novel.
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Jun 20, 2023 21:41
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nonathlon posted:
Oh yeah, numbers are a thing too. There's a lot of times where I'll see one that looks potentially interesting, then it'll be 12th in a series by an author I've never heard of, and I'll just go eh. Especially for crime novels. Maybe not so much an indicator of being terrible, it just makes them feel like they're never gonna give me anything impactful enough to put in the effort to read.
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Jun 21, 2023 02:25
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WarpDogs posted:Cozy  I've even read and enjoyed several cozy mysteries, but that description drives me up the wall for some reason
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Jun 21, 2023 17:50
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You genrepunks and your definitiongates  
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Jun 22, 2023 15:56
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Any author worth their salt knows that they can just pull out an "as you know,..." whenever they need to organically provide readers with information that the characters would already be aware of in-universe
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Jun 23, 2023 17:56
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Lol, that's pretty great. I didn't recognize it from the description, but I do remember reading it at some point now.
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Jun 23, 2023 20:28
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don longjohns posted:The footnotes in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are pretty fun, for instance. I've only "read" that one in audio form. I eventually grew to love it on my second try, but man, that footnote-centric format is really not well-suited to the audio medium. You get used to it, but it really takes you out of the story much more than the regular print version. Actually, I do a ton of audiobook listening, and there are quite a few particular things I find entertaining but aggravating in how they translate from print to narration. Things like pages of code numbers or paragraphs of nonsense words spoken by an insane character are fine in a book because you can just scan by in a couple seconds to get the gist of what the author wanted, but they come across as annoying when it's a narrator reading everything out verbatim. Similarly, techier stories that involve lots of emails or web citations get old really fast when the narrator is reading out the email details and time stamps every time, or reading out "h t t p colon forward slash forward slash w w w dot website address dot com forward slash subdirectory name" for every web source. I'm sure it's because a subset of readers will complain if you don't have everything exactly verbatim from the print release, but I'd much rather have a thoughtful edit for the audio version. Captain Hygiene has a new favorite as of 20:08 on Jun 24, 2023 |
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Jun 24, 2023 19:46
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