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ZakAce posted:David Eddings isn't good (to say the least) but I'm pretty sure he's better than Piers Anthony if for no other reason that (AFAIK) there isn't any creepy paedophile stuff in his books. My 8th-grade lit teacher once told me that David Eddings had done time in jail and/or prison for child abuse, and that's where he started to write the Belgariad. My mom, who had lived in the same town as the teacher at that time, said this was true. But I have never found any evidence to back up their story.
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Sep 15, 2016 03:34
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No, her legal name IS Alexander Graham Bell. Tinker is just her nickname. Her cousin is named Orville Wright but goes by Oilcan. Not gonna lie, I actually enjoy this series. But then I probably have low standards so...
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Sep 15, 2016 22:04
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I have read more Sandra Hill books than I like to admit, and they are all the same flavor of crazy. The heroine is often a doctor or similar professional. In one book, the time-traveling Navy Seal Viking 'amusingly' misunderstood the love interest's title and called her his "dock-whore" throughout the ENTIRE book. She never corrected him and no one found it odd.
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Jan 11, 2017 03:46
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TheKennedys posted:I've discussed my hatelove for David Eddings before but the further we sink into hellworld the more skeeved out I get by his constant, shoehorned middle-aged man/teenaged girl romances (Still reread the Elenium from time to time though. Sparhawk and Ehlana's relationship is creepy but it's still mostly a fun yarn.)
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May 24, 2019 00:07
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Safety Biscuits posted:It's on his Wikipedia page, with links to newspaper reports. Fortunately the print was too small to read the details. Huh, there's the power of the internet. 30+ years ago the Spearfish newspaper told me I didn't have enough info to find any relevant story, and my half-hearted Googling over the years was clearly not well-targeted. Sorry for doubting you, mom.
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May 26, 2019 01:31
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Jerry Cotton posted:Having never read them, is horny crow man literally a bird? Later there is a short story where they are married and have triplets and his former-crow friends pressure him to murder one of the babies because she has dwarfism.
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May 28, 2019 07:06
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IshmaelZarkov posted:Did the lark just ask them nicely, or did it coerce them?
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May 28, 2019 08:04
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thepopmonster posted:
I just wanted you to know I saw that.
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May 8, 2020 23:29
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quote:writing knowledgeably of the clitoris Tbf this is still a problem for a lot of writers. I recall one example that made the Twitter rounds, where a sex scene went something like, "He slid both thumbs into her clitoris and pulled it wide open."
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Jul 9, 2021 20:32
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muscles like this! posted:There's also Red Shadows which was the first Solomon Kane short story and it pretty quickly gets super racist as Solomon ends up chasing a guy who takes refuge in a native village and the descriptions of the villagers get pretty bad. (spoilered for racism) So that description sorta implies that Solomon Kane's head isn't situated between his shoulders. Which raises some questions about the prevalence of scoliosis among white people, I guess.
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Sep 29, 2021 22:56
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Apparently David Drake was once offended by a critic named Charles Platt, who accused Drake of writing war porn and said he wouldn't do that if he'd seen actual combat. Ever since, every single Drake sci-fi book has had a character named Charles (or Charlie, or Chuck, etc.) Platt and hes always a contemptible villain. Ranging from petty corrupt bureaucrats to cringing murderous pedophiles. I guess what I am saying is, some people *really* know how to hold a grudge.
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Mar 12, 2022 07:57
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SimonChris posted:I clicked on that quote and stumbled upon this post on the same page: I tried looking it up in the local newspaper archives when I was in middle school but found nothing. Back in the late 80s that was all just getting copied onto microfiche and it was a huge pain to go through. I eventually gave up and then, color me surprised to find out decades later that it's all on Wikipedia. I got the impression from my English teacher that Eddings distanced himself hard from any indication that he ever even lived in South Dakota. I would imagine that when he was a big name author, his publisher might have also had some vested interest in deflecting any inquiries along those lines.
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May 24, 2023 21:05
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The Wicked ZOGA posted:He probably didn't write it, all those dadthriller guys use ghostwriters eventually He pretty openly switched to having his brother write the books just recently, so it doesn't seem like he had a ghostwriter before. I think he is just not the most skilled writer. I still regularly think back to the book where Reacher (50-something years old) spends a summer in Key West digging swimming pools by hand, and ends up so tanned and muscular that his arms look like "pantyhose stuffed with walnuts."
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May 29, 2023 12:50
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Sobatchja Morda posted:Sounds familiar. Does he also wear a lot of pouches, but leaves the feet out because he cant write feet? ? No, but let me tell you about the sex scene with the woman with severe facial injuries that continually ooze pus.
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May 29, 2023 13:28
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I always thought that the political structures of the Harrington books felt like they were written as he was browsing through some kind of historical trivia book. "Oh, I recognized that bit, it's going in a book along with this other bit that sounds cool. They don't really make sense together but nobody is gonna notice." Contrasted to, say, David Drake who will have a foreword explaining exactly which specific pre-classical civilization inspired the minor kingdom featured in chapter 32, and citing the classical sources. Which he read in Latin, of course. (I really like Drake, to be clear,)
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Jun 21, 2023 11:04
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Carthag Tuek posted:re things that put you off books before you even read them: I read a book recently that had a "cast list" at the beginning, sorted into groups. One of the groups was "deceased people" and it included the name of a character who was alive at the start of the book and whose death 2/3rds in was clearly meant to be a shock to the reader. Still haven't figured that one out. Did they assume nobody reads those so it's ok to post spoilers? Was it originally meant to go in the end of the book and got moved?  If an author feels that their reader will need Cliff's Notes to keep track of all the characters, they should probably take that as a failure on their part. Also, I don't *need* to know/remember the name of the 3rd prison guard on the left from the prologue 2 books ago. If it's actually important, the author should be able to work a reminder into the actual text where it's relevant.
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Jun 23, 2023 17:28
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don longjohns posted:How dare you besmirch Ursula K. Le Guin and the Earthsea series If it's a good map, I might see it as a positive sign that the author paid attention to things like traveling time, and how geographical features inform political boundaries, and the types of weather that characters might encounter, etc. If it is just the same generic squared-off continent divided arbitrarily into a bunch of kingdoms, then I'mma skip right past it.
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Jun 23, 2023 17:46
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Serephina posted:Is this you mocking Shakespeare publications, or am I not getting the joke? Cuz I sure as heck remember reading Hamlet in HS and trying to figure out why out of cast of a few dozen people, two nobodies are listed under "survivors", and thinking "is it some sort of cool group"? I wasn't referring to Shakespeare or any actual play where a cast list would make sense. It was just a "paranormal/urban fantasy" novel that, for some reason, opened with a long list of every named character. They were listed out like: quote:Werewolves wheatpuppy has a new favorite as of 05:07 on Jun 24, 2023 |
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Jun 24, 2023 04:22
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One time I picked up a book at Goodwill based on the title alone (Bigfoot and the Librarian). It was a romance where a librarian moves to a mysterious small town and it turns out that Bigfoot lives there. And the reason that nobody ever catches Bigfoot is that he is a ....were-Bigfoot? Shapeshifter? Not sure of the terminology.regarding shifting, the author posted:When the hair started to grow, it tickled. Then, for a few seconds, it actually hurt. His legs grew longer, and that hurt a little, too. He was accustomed to the pain, and did not mind it. When his penis drew entirely into his body it didn’t hurt, but the sensation was odd, like no other he had ever experienced I think about that specific scene a lot, for some reason. wheatpuppy has a new favorite as of 07:12 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 04:17
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Captain Hygiene posted:This isn't anything new, but it popped up in my feed and made me laugh all over again: Great Moments in Historical Novel Research, when an author did some googling for dye ingredients and somehow wound up putting recipes from a Zelda game into their book There was that one woman who wrote a book about (iirc) homosexuality being punishable by death in England. Only to find out, in a live interview after publication, that she had completely misunderstood the legal terminology she was quoting.
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Jul 6, 2023 03:47
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Captain Hygiene posted:Oh yeah, I remember that one too. There was some wording that was confusing if you accepted it at a cursory level without any further research, but I forget the exact details and my searches are way too vague to find that case. It was bugg Naomi Wolf posted:"People widely believe that the last executions for sodomy were in 1830,” Wolf told the Observer. “But I read every Old Bailey record throughout the 19th century, so I know that not only did they continue; they got worse.” quote:According to Sweet, who first challenged Wolf on Radio 3’s Arts and Ideas, her error concerning Silver stems from a misunderstanding of “the very precise historical legal term, ‘death recorded’, as evidence of execution, when in fact it indicates the opposite”. E:f,beaten like a 19th-C prisoner
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Jul 6, 2023 04:23
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HopperUK posted:It was incredibly easy to find out too. Like, you can look up the courtroom records yourself and find out that many of the people who had their 'deaths recorded' went on to have other things happen to them later on. Well that's a whole 'nother book in itself, about the Secret Zombie Invasion of 1843.
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Jul 6, 2023 04:29
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Captain Hygiene posted:Lol, I always forget he exists but instantly hear OH JOHN RINGO NO in my head the moment I see his name. Some while back, I read a series that was co-authored by John Ringo and another author, Travis Taylor. It had a lot of the usual libertarian Baen crap but wasn't as bad as, say, that one series where the heroes were the Waffen-SS. So I thought, oh, this Travis guy must be more normal by comparison and therefore the collaboration toned things down. So when I found Warp Speed at the local thrift store I was happy to plunk down $1.50 for it. That was a very bad idea. It has been over a decade and I still sometimes randomly find myself goggling over how ridiculously bad that book was.
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Aug 1, 2023 19:54
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Tunicate posted:Ringo wasn't the SS guy, you're thinking of Tom Kratman Yeah, Ringo was a co-author with Kratman on at least one of those.
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Aug 1, 2023 20:50
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Woolie Wool posted:I have no idea why people translate pedicabo et irrumabo like that when "buttfuck and skullfuck" are much better English. Maybe it is just me, but in my lexicon "facefuck" involves a mouth whereas "skullfuck" features eyesockets. So there's a different vibe.
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Sep 20, 2023 04:16
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Tiggum posted:I used to always finish books I started, but somewhere in my 20s I realised that I could just read something good instead and have never looked back. If I'm 10% into a book and it hasn't grabbed me (and I haven't been warned in advance that it starts slow but gets good later or whatever) then I'll chuck it and try something else. If I'm three quarters of the way through and I realise I just don't care any more? Drop it. Read something else. Too much stuff to read/watch/play to waste time like that. It took me until my 40s to figure this out.  So much time wasted on books that were either utterly forgettable, or so terrible they still haunt my waking hours.
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Mar 4, 2024 04:43
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