PYF terrible book: Freud molesting a thesaurus.

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Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

GOTTA STAY FAI posted:

Why is Brian Herbert not in the OP or the thread title

Because, with the exception of Tleilaxu farts, those books aren't even amusing or interestingly bad. They're just bland rubbish.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2015 22:00

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 19:57

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Also this is a good article

What is this poo poo?

quote:

I felt like Luke Skywalker surveying a hangar full of A-, Y- and X-Wing Fighters just before the Battle of Yavin. Or Captain Apollo, climbing into the cockpit of his Viper on the Galactica’s flight deck. Ender Wiggin arriving at Battle School. Or Alex Rogan, clutching his Star League uniform, staring wide-eyed at a hangar full of Gunstars

Look at this! This tells me nothing about how that character feels, because every character referenced climbs into that cockpit for fundamentally different reasons. If all the author took from those scenes is "woah, spaceships" then he sucks at watching movies as much as he does at writing.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 07:20

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

I read it seriously until it quoted Warhammer 40k and I went "Christ". Now I can look back on the whole thing and say "Christ".

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 17:06

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

trickybiscuits posted:

I opened The Da Vinci Code and read about half a paragraph of somebody lecturing somebody else about history. Forget it; I get lectured enough by idiots in real life.

I also read some of the book that The Da Vinci Code is based on, called Holy Blood, Holy Grail. What I read was the chapter on medieval grail romances, since I'd just finished a Masters degree in medieval studies (mostly literature). Man was it lovely. It was pretty clearly written by people who didn't know anything about medieval literature or theology. How am I supposed to take that skit seriously? Also I don't know if they ever explained why the Cathars, Christian heretics who rejected that Christ had a physical body, would have embraced the idea that Christ had had offspring. I have a feeling they didn't.

Thrillers about the Cathars and/or Templar knights are enjoyable garbage, though.

My favourite part of the Da Vinci Code was the absurd blue balling in the french chick's flashbacks.

"When she was a child....she witnessed something....TERRIBLE"

Three chapters pass. Next flashback.

"She crept down the stairs. She open the door. She saw something....TERRIBLE"

Three chapters pass. Next flashback.

"She crept down the stairs. She open the door. She saw....her grandfather...he was doing....something...TERRIBLE"

gently caress. Off. With. That. poo poo.......TERRIBLE

# ¿ Jul 10, 2015 22:04

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Carnival of Shrews posted:

IMO no fantasy novel in the world is as marvellous, nuanced, characterful and imaginative as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was hyped as being, and at times -- many, many times -- the narrative slows to a stalactite pace. It's a decent and inventive book that would have been hugely better with some crisp editing (and I don't mean the footnotes).

For something that really crashed badly, but was even more ambitious, I nominate Vellum by Hal Duncan, a 2005 fantasy novel with an intended scope that makes JS&MR look like a portrait miniature. It looms up in my mind because it makes most of the errors I fear I'd make myself: it's unfathomably complicated, out-there pretentious, references far too many mythologies, and nearly all the main characters have at least three alter egos, not a few of them Mesopotamian deities.

However, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't saddle anyone with a name like Phreedom Messenger or Don Coyote without very good reason. Hal Duncan doesn't have a good reason, and also, the notion of a simple linear narrative is his spittoon. I thought that reading Michael Moorcock meant I could follow any narrative weave, but for the love of me, I couldn't make head or tail of Vellum. It has a sequel, Ink, which I haven't read and never intend to. A sample of Vellum can be found here:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/vellum.htm

(also, anyone who has read Vellum and/or Ink: what is Metatron, really, apart from it's borrowed Jewish name, and what exactly is Cant? Do we ever find out?)

I have to read these books. It sounds like Gaimans worst excesses, by way of Illuminatus! and written by a man who comma splices every third sentence.

The only line in that sample that didn't have me eye rolling was "It's August 4th, 2017. Sort of."

From a review of Ink: "Here the conflict is reproduced in passages from a host of different books, including a cowboy novel by Joe Campbell, a thriller by R. Graves and of course, inevitably and recursively, Ink by Hal Duncan."

gently caress this guy so much. I love him.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2015 10:19

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Hogge Wild posted:

apart from this post, you shouldn't ever listen for goons' opinions

This is the unofficial motto of every sub-forum in The Finer Arts

# ¿ Nov 9, 2015 14:28

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Lamprey Cannon posted:

So, here's the thing with the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels: they are bad. Thing is, that as time goes by, they get consistently worse. You read the first one, which is very bad, and then they keep piling on nonsensical bullshit that clearly demonstrates they didn't get what was cool about the original Dune books. I present an example:

So, in the first 'Dune', we are told that Leto's father, the elder Duke Atreides, was killed in a bullfight. This is something that says a tremendous deal about the society in which the story takes place, where not only would a major figure take place in such an event, but that there isn't any kind of advanced medical technology that could heal the wounds inflicted in such a fight. The first three Brian/Kevin prequel novels go through the backstory immediately leading up to the events of Dune, including that aforementioned bullfight, in which they reveal that it's a space bull with tentacles and acid for blood, which is loving stupid and overindulgent and completely misses the point of the original bit in the story. The Baron Harkonnen is a loving fat gross weirdo because he's a pinnacle of hedonism. He's fat because he loving loves eating food, he's a futuristic Caligula, at the pinnacle of excess. In the Brian/Herbert prequels, it's revealed that Lady Jessica implanted a gene modification virus thing in him to make him fat. That's it! Again, it's loving stupid bullshit technobabbly sci-fi that completely misses the point of the original novels.

Then, in the double-prequels, we get to hear the story of the Butlerian Jihad, the vaguely-referenced event in the original books that led to the outlawing of all thinking machines. These are such a blur that it's hard for me to even remember. The way the story gets told here is basically 'evil robots took over the world, so now we're not going to let there be robots anymore'. There's an evil robot-overmind called Omnius that's taken over all of humanity, and there are a privileged few humans who got to stick their brains in robotic bodies and become 'Cymeks'. Everybody else is downtrodden peasants. Much like the Star Wars prequels, loving everything that happened in the original books gets some nod in the Butlerian Jihad novels. The story of the swordmaster school in which Duncan Idaho was trained gets told (electro-swords for fighting robots, see above for 'loving stupid, completely misses the point'). The invention of the space-folding technology that allows rapid interstellar travel gets described, and it turns out the guy who 'invented' it just took credit for his assistant's work. This assistant later gets vaporized by a cymek, but Doctor Manhattans herself back into reality. Then she founds the Bene Gesserit order. Then she founds the Guild Navigators. Then she fucks off to nobody cares where (this will be important in a bit, unfortunately enough). Also, Omnius puts on gladitorial fights with the cymeks. I don't loving know why, other than to have descriptions of 'cool' robot battles with lasers and explosions. Also, in maybe my favorite part of the whole story, there's a whole drawn-out conversation where somebody asks the robot overmind why the robots don't just live on moons and planets with atmospheres that aren't habitable by humans, and the overmind doesn't have any good answer, basically going 'well, it's the principle of the thing!'. Poking holes in your own dumb-rear end plot doesn't make you look clever, book! Also the Harkonnens are there, and there's one of them who's a total dick for no reason, and he founds the dynasty of dickish-Harkonnens. Also, some Fremen are there, and they have a SANDWORM BATTLE, where they bonk their sandworms into each other until one of them dies. At the end, the robots all get destroyed, but manage to send a signal out into deep space, setting up the inevitable sequel. gently caress those books.

Double-gently caress the sequel. So, allegedly, according to Brian Herbert, his dad left a lock-box full of notes on what he wanted to do with Dune 7. Heretics and Chapterhouse allude to some force on the edges of the Galaxy that was driving the Honoured Matres back into the old empire, so there was a lot of speculation as to what it might be. Fuckin', it's the robots. It's the loving robots. So there. Now, at the end of Chapterhouse, the uber-Duncan Idaho who remembers all of his past clone-lives, and some other people, escape on a big ol' spaceship. In 'Hunters of Dune', it turns out that somebody has a null-capsule full of DNA samples from all the major characters of the original Dune novels! So we loving clone everybody. Paul Atreides is there, both Letos are there, the whole loving gang. Remember what I said about having to shoehorn in everything that was in the originals? Meanwhile, the villains of the story (who at the get-go seem to be the face-morphing people that the Tleilaxu keep cloning) have their own one of these null-capsules, so they clone their own Baron Harkonnen, and make themselves an Evil Paul Atreides, that the Baron will raise up to be super evil. Meanwhile, you know how the Tleilaxu have been trying to make synthetic spice for 5000 years, and never succeeded? Somebody gets the idea to, instead of cloning the spice, clone the sandworms. Apparently, nobody ever ever thought of this. And it works! They genetically engineer sandworms that actually like water, call them seaworms, and set them to work on some planet. There they make [b]ultra-spice[/i], which is like regular spice but a billion times more potent! gently caress you Kevin Anderson and/or Brian Herbert. So, the face-dancers spring their plan, but the plan fails because actually they've been played by the actual villains, the robots! The stupid robots are back from the edges of the galaxy with a gigantic fleet. How did they manage to turn a radio signal into an actual physical robotic device? Who the gently caress cares! Then the lady from the prequels who invented the warp drive and the Bene Gesserit and the guild navigators shows up and blips all the robots out of existence. That's it. I cannot think of another example in all of fiction of a better example of a Deus Ex Machina. Oh, then to wrap everything up in a nice bow, the evil Paul Atreides eats some of the ultra-spice, so he can become God or whatever, and he gets trapped in a vision of the universe, starting at the big bang, evolving to the present second, and then starting over. So he takes a bunch of drugs and goes catatonic, basically. That's it. That's your story. Night night.

I understand there are actually a couple more BH/KJA books, but I just can't. I can't.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Also a scene with Tleilaxu entertaining clone-Baron by loudly farting.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2016 08:10

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Smoke posted:

I finally got around to finishing Sandworms of Dune this week, and it's just about as poo poo as told here. Bonus points in that there's 2 deus ex machina happening, first the lady from the prequels(now starring as the Oracle of Time, never mentioned before in the original books) takes the evil computer mind to another dimension where he can never do harm again, then the remaining sentient robot just literally NODDING HIS HEAD causing all the Face-dancers to die because they were designed with a killswitch. Then Duncan Idaho gets all of the robot's powers to unite the galaxy and here's your happy end, nobody's gonna die anymore.

Also, the Baron is portrayed with all the loving care and feeling usually reserved for a Captain Planet villain. He literally kills a kitten earlier on(asking for a new pet because the previous one "broke"), and is described as loving pollution and machines and hating nature. His first order of business when they dump him on Caladan? Get some good old machinery and pollution going! Hell, it's not even for any reason other than "I hate plantlife and clean air, let's pollute".

Not to mention all the characters that get casually killed off as soon as they serve their purpose of furthering whatever wafer-thin plot element they're part of.

The two books really read like some bad fanfic of someone who desperately wants the original cast back and turn Duncan Idaho into some kind of god.

Also tleilaxu farts.

What annoys me most about the Baron is how Dune is very careful to show that he's not a completely incoherent hedonistic monster, he's a very careful and rational hedonistic monster. There's that fantastic conversation he has with Feyd that is essentially "now I love rape and murder as much as you do, maybe even more, but every now and then you need to stop raping, act like a sensible human being, and do something useful. Now to prove my point, let's go murder your favourite concubine". Same deal as Roose + Ramsay Bolton.

Duncan kwisatz haderach-ing himself was pretty cool though, and I think was started in Chapterhouse

# ¿ Jun 28, 2016 22:15

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

NLJP posted:

I was pleasantly surprised by how it all wrapped up in the end. Mind you, I've forgotten most of it now so it can't have been that amazing.

The ending was pretty cool, with all the named characters going out in heroic ways, the conga line of duels, the crazed wizard aiel out of nowhere, volcano portals, RTS windows, zombie bait n switch, dream teleporting and death laser catching.

Course, none of that was relevant to anything, because Rand was busy having a poorly thought out metaphysical struggle with the devil.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2016 17:16

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

mania posted:

My library has the US editions and I kept walking past the books and the cover just didn't look or sound interesting. Saw the UK edition in a bookshop and promptly snapped it up because of the cover. It took a few more visits to the library before I figured out they were one and the same.

I always thought Rivers of London was nonfiction - the UK cover (and the title) make it sound like it's about Jack the Ripper, or grisly murders in London sewers.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 08:08

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

WickedHate posted:

Hmm...sounds disturbingly familiar.

That is an impressively inane webcomic, even by the standards of webcomics.

Also using the Litany against Fear as part of a story about domestic abuse is embarrassingly tone - deaf

# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 07:15

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Sir Robert Bastarde is not a British citizen despite using a title that only British citizens can be awarded, and despite having the most obnoxiously on-the-nose "posh British twat" name.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2016 18:29

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Tiggum posted:

That's not so much a straw man as a pile of straw that he's just grabbing handfuls of, throwing them in the air and yelling "This is a feminist!"

Unless he was knighted in a different country, or just uses the title anyway despite not officially being allowed. Of all the criticisms to make, that one's pretty weak.

Yeah but Sir Robert Bastarde, not actually British is a bit like "Dmitri Vassilev, famed Chinese gymnast" in my mind. Feels like a very obvious and clumsy attempt at avoiding clichés

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 11:41

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

there wolf posted:

I liked Name off the Wind. I guess a teenage boy's first person narrative excuses a lot of self-involvement and the people around Kovothe were contemptuous enough to establish a pretty unreliable narrator.

And then came book two and the sex fairy...

The Farseer Trilogy does a much better job of "precocious talented teenager" especially as he gets routinely chewed out for cocking stuff up.

He also gets poisoned on a near weekly basis.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2016 16:22

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Ryoshi posted:

I actually like a lot of his prose so far. It's obvious that it's been edited to hell and back and has this weird air of pretension about it like he's super-sure that he's writing the next LotR but it seems to flow a ton better and be all-around more fun to read than what little I got through of A Song of Ice and Fire, which is pretty much my only other modern-written traditional fantasy book.

I think I realized why Kvothe's Gary-Stu-ness doesn't grate on me as badly as it normally probably would - it's the framing device of Kvothe detailing his exploits as he sits around his lovely tavern. It's all presented as gospel truth, not something that he's making up as he goes, but just the fact that it's a guy reflecting on adventures that have already occurred rather than new challenges as the book progresses changes the scope from "wait, do they seriously expect me to believe he can pull this off?" to "wow, that's insane that he managed to pull this off!" It's just a little bit of mental rewiring, and it's pretty cheap on the author's part, but it seems to make things a bit more palatable.

Oh it's got a nice poetic flow to it, it's just utter loving nonsense. "silence of three parts" my arse.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2016 20:39

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Could. Could barely speak English.

(Forgive me!)

If they still can't understand English then this is correct even if they're not still backwards hicks.

Clunky as hell though.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2016 22:11

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Arcsquad12 posted:

Fair enough. My clunky vocabulary aside, I still find a lot of people in my hometown hate reading Shakespeare. There is no point arguing poetry with high school students who are mostly heading straight for the workforce rather than pursuing a career in literature.

Pretty much, yeah. I think some of it comes down to poor choice of texts - our lower sets at school did Macbeth which is bloody heavy, and the higher grades got Twelfth Night, which is not just easier, but loving hilarious.

We also did love poetry with a cynical recent divorcee. Half the poems were about murderous lovers, the other half "come on, have sex with me, please, go on, you know you want to" Which is something that really speaks to a teenage audience.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2016 19:16

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Cumslut1895 posted:

There's an amazing podcast about bad books called I Don't Even Own A Television

I'm halfway through their one on Snow Crash, and it seems to be largely them complaining how the satire doesn't work, and then reading out bits of satire that they're treating as serious.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2016 14:45

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Electric Lady posted:

Reminds me of:

A metaphor is a glorious thing/A diamond Ring/The first day of summer/A metaphor is a breath of fresh-air/a turn on/an aphrodesiac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAWi41KiDdw

# ¿ Sep 22, 2016 22:44

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

I'm seeing a disconnect between this:

food court bailiff posted:

What doesn't happen is that malformed tissue rises as an angry murderous adult from a mock grave that it wasn't even buried in to begin with, going around and killing all of the people that led to him being outed as the protagonist's pseudonym, before rotting like a zombie and getting carried off into the sunset by a bunch of sparrows like some hosed up Mary Poppins pastiche.

And this:

quote:

The Dark Half is really shockingly bad.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2016 15:38

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

The Twilight series is pretty cool when she forgets about the romance poo poo and pretends she's writing X-Men instead. My favourite bit is when the guy who can read minds is playing chess with the girl who can see the future. They just stare at each other over the board and eventually one of them knocks over their king :allears:

# ¿ Dec 4, 2016 17:48

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Tunicate posted:

Yeah imprinting on a fetus as a romantic partner, then the parent giving the baby to that person to raise is super hosed up

At the same time, becoming pregnant with a monstrous vampire hybrid that is so strong it breaks your spine when it kicks is super :black101:

hosed up

# ¿ Dec 4, 2016 19:37

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

food court bailiff posted:

Have you actually read the book? Because it ends with Kvothe almost getting killed by some random mook demon at his run-down lovely country tavern because of a nasty and apparently permanent case of magical erectile dysfunction. The whole point really is that no matter what heroics he's done in the past, he's completely washed up by the time the first book starts and he begins telling this huge story about himself.

I haven't read the second book with the sex-demon yet so maybe that goes off a cliff but I really liked that the first book goes out of its way to bookend all these tales of grandeur about Kvothe with him being a worried middle age guy literally waiting for death and hoping nobody notices him.

He loses his virginity to the queen of the sex fairies, who doesn't believe that he's a virgin because he's so great in bed. I think he's also the only person who is able to leave to the queen of the sex fairies without going insane for constant sex from her. When he gets back to the real world some barmaid is able to sense that he's no longer a virgin and pretty much jumps on his dick as soon as she can.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2016 18:16

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

flosofl posted:

Honor Harrington series by David Weber.

It's basically a pastiche of the old Haratio Hornblower books, with the lead changed to a woman and in the future.

Those books throw me off because it looks like the title should be alliterative. But HON-er HA-rington.Feels weird, and 'onor 'Arrington makes it sound like a book about space cockney.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 11:19

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

WickedHate posted:

I've never really read any of the Clancy books, but the weird right wing bullshit is rampant in the video games too. The entire premise of Splinter Cell is that there's a special heroic agency that exists to do things the government can't normally under the constitution, which is..uncomfortable.

There was a preview of I think Blacklist that neatly summed up the weird sociopathic nature of these games. You interrogate a guy by shoving your fingers in his bullet wounds, and have to wiggle the thumbsticks to extract information. You're then given the option to let him live, or to execute him :

"That's right, a moral choice after an interactive torture scene"

# ¿ Dec 21, 2016 13:24

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Stephenie Meyer.

I love that it's five e's.

Because her father was Stephen and they just feminised the name by adding an ie, despite there already being a female form of Stephen.

Although I like to think she has two younger sisters called Stephener and Stephenest.

# ¿ May 9, 2017 18:51

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

there wolf posted:

Twilight may be a pretty unoriginal romance story, but it's not a pure-stream regurgitation of girl-culture nostalgia in the least. That poo poo has yet to really escape the fanfiction ghetto.

Also RPO would be vastly improved by copying Twilight's technique of inserting a chapter full of blank white pages.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2017 16:03

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

The Iron Rose posted:

I quite liked Clariel because I didn't catch the increasingly (and intentionally) obvious twist until like 2/3rds of the way into the book, and so it was a big realization.

the twist being that Chlorr of the Mask is an ex Abhorsen? Cos that's in Abhorsen, and made 12 year old me feel like the smartest kid alive.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 13:59

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Perestroika posted:

Yeah, the final twist was about the last straw when I noped the hell out and threw the goddamn book into a corner. It was just so utterly half-assed, and only popped up like 30 pages out from the end. It actually could have made for something potentially interesting if it had come up somewhere about halfway through: Imagine a character who has been ludicrously, cartoonishly evil for most of his life and had built a reputation upon that, but then it turns out that whole thing was due to an outside influence. That gives you an interesting hook for having the character try to deal with their position in life now that they actually have a functioning conscience, and trying to deal with the trauma of actually having done all that hosed up poo poo. A certain conflict between just how much of everything was due to the compulsion and how much they did out of their own free will. But instead it comes in at the very last moment as basically a cheap "Welp, turns out he's not actually culpable for anything, so I get to have my cake and eat it, too". Perhaps that whole issue is brought up in the sequels, but gently caress reading anything more of that.

It was not. The sequels just add even more convoluted ultra-violence.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 12:31

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Arcsquad12 posted:

That prince of thorns discussion made me think of the last third of a clockwork orange for some reason. Alex justifiably gets the poo poo kicked out of him even after his reconditioning. And he loving deserved it.

Prince of Thorns is very deliberately trying to be a fantasy Clockwork Orange, it even riffs on the "chill winter bastard though dry" line and you can feel how pleased with himself the author is. Except Alex actually changes, whilst Jorg is the fixed point at the centre of the universe.

The post apocalyptic stuff is genuinely nicely done though. Especially the demon in the wall that shouts at everyone "WARNING FOREIGN PRESENCE DETECTED. INITIATING TERMINATION SEQUENCE"

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 17:03

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Inescapable Duck posted:

A Series Of Unfortunate Events and Harry Potter really only have in common the same themes of most young adult literature; teenage protagonists having to grow up quickly in a weird alternate world full of strange and dangerous things, and every single adult and authority figure is either evil, incompetent, impotent or not paying attention, often some combination of the above.

You can probably see why it's very popular with teenagers.

And the show seems to be taking the same approach - give the central children as little heavy lifting to do as possible, and surround them with buckets of well known actors chewing the poo poo out of the scenery. It's delightful.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2017 11:24

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Oxxidation posted:

Yeah, that whole essay is pointlessly cruel.

It's not like the anecephalic baby thing where goons hounded a grieving couple - tropers put there stuff out there and attempted to argue for why their stuff was superior to other poetry.

Aside from the TVTropes bashing, I think it's a nice little demonstration of why some poems work and others are garbage. Would probably improve a lot of high schoolers output.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2017 12:42

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

His ship and robot action is vastly more interesting than his human stuff - the opening of Excession has a drone escaping from a hacked ship, bouncing of pressure waves, rerouting forcefields, jettisoning memory cores, all takes place over a matter of seconds. It's pretty great.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2017 17:57

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Pastry of the Year posted:

I am absolutely not turning this into an e/n thread derail, but I'm doing the online dating thing, and so you know how that basically goes with the introductory "getting to know you messages" and such:

me (paraphrase) : "What have you really lately that you really liked?"
she (verbatim) : "My current favorite book is Ready Player One. I've read it multiple times."

me (at my screen) :

I literally sucked air through clenched teeth when I got to that sentence, and I thought this thread would appreciate it.

Channel that book rage into a creative profile!

"Here is a list of books. Most of them I love, one of them I hate with an intensity that sometimes worries me. Guess correctly and I'll buy you a dessert!"

Can't fail.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2017 12:17

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Rothfuss and Morrisey are both significantly richer than any goon, are we allowed to criticise them?

# ¿ Oct 12, 2017 10:25

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Wheat Loaf posted:

Morrissey from the Smiths? I never read his books because I think he's a oval office. I've heard his autobiography is meant to be good, though.

Yeah, who went straight onto Penguin Classics despite not being even close to a classic. I was much happier when I thought it was by David Morrisey from dodgy 90s sitcom Men Behaving Badly.

I'd be really interested in seeing a BotL takedown of Morrisey or some similar dreadful literary fiction, if only to clearly delineate "literary" from "good"

# ¿ Oct 12, 2017 10:34

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Wheat Loaf posted:

I imagine the Penguin Classics badge has been put on worse things (granted, I'm saying that despite not having read Morrissey's books).

Morrisey posted:

At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone

# ¿ Oct 12, 2017 10:50

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Wheat Loaf posted:

That would be pretty good if it was meant to be a comedy.

He seems to be missing her vagina and just bashing her all over with his dick, so I am leaning towards comedy, yeah.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2017 11:14

Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

Mr. Sunshine posted:

and nothing matters. In the end I think he actually doesn't give the the AI over to the Culture's enemies, and in an epilogue we find that this was such a splendid action that they named a spaceship after him 500 years in the future or something. That's it, end of story. Then in the back there's a timeline of events that they never mention in the book and has no relevance to the events taking place, and the entire setting is actually in the past and the Culture are actually not humans? Or something?

That's the whole point of the book - after all his struggles, after all the blood sweat and tears, nobody cares. Nobody even knows what happened, apart from the Mind he rescues (they don't name a Ship after him, the Mind names itself after him) and his long running enemy, who promptly autoeuthanises because of the sheer futility of it all. War sucks, and while the events of the book meant a great deal to Horza and the Mind, it just gets lost among the billions of other deaths and struggles of the Idiran war, callously summarised in the epilogue as "a fairly minor conflict".

The island cannibals I can't defend. Banks likes to play around with weird poo poo (the eccentricity vs perversion is a deliberate false dichotomy that runs through the whole series) but he takes it too far, and those chapters just drag on with seemingly no purpose.

Edit: If we want to slag off and Iain Banks book, I'd like to put forward his non-"M" Walking on Glass - 3 disconnected and largely tedious narratives that clumsily smash together to give the freshman level message of "what even is real, dude?"

Strom Cuzewon has a new favorite as of 11:07 on Oct 18, 2017

# ¿ Oct 18, 2017 10:57

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Strom Cuzewon: Jul 1, 2010

CommissarMega posted:

Are there any books like this which are good? It does sound like a hoot if done right.

There was one really popular one a few years back, about some dude with a goofy name. Gilligan? Goliver? Something like that.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2017 13:20

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF terrible book: Freud molesting a thesaurus.

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