Florida Betty posted:

And you didn't even read the sequels. I'll summarize for you: Ayla goes off into the world on her own and invents everything now known to modern man (taming horses and inventing effective weapons and whatnot), and then finds a very attractive man who had never had pleasurable sex before because his penis was too gigantic for most women, but fortunately Ayla's apparently massive vagina was able to contain it. Naturally they are a perfect fit for each other. Then they wander around the world having lots of sex, which, if I recall correctly, involves a lot of licking each other's nipples in counter clockwise circles.

Weatherman posted:

My mother sent me a copy of Digital Fortress, also by Dan Brown, shortly after I moved to Japan and was yet to source some bedtime reading material. I appreciated the thought, but once I finished reading the book -- and I had to force myself to finish the final third or so just out of some kind of completion OCD -- I put it straight in the recycling. I've only read one worse book, and that was something I picked up from a "take a book, leave a book" tray in a caravan park somewhere in New South Wales.

Dan Brown is a bad writer. I've never read or watched any of his other works, but I'm comfortable making that generalisation. The characters were one-dimensional and each had a single purpose; upcoming plot points were telegraphed to the point of "I can skip the next chapter because he's already implied what's going to happen"; the entire book read more like a screenplay to a Michael Bay movie; and the descriptions of technology were excruciatingly, ball-twistingly awful. We're talking "hack the Gibson" levels of bullshittery. Dan Brown does not understand software, nor hardware, nor cryptography.

I guess I wasn't the target market after all. Perhaps instead of appealing to techies, he was aiming for the "use Excel to write a letter, print it out, scan it in as a PDF, then rotate it, print it out again and fax it to Grandma" crowd. 1/10 would not use to line my birdcage.

Arcsquad12 posted:

The best Discworld cover is Night Watch doing a parody of Rembrandt's The Night Watch.

divabot posted:

there wolf posted:

Earthsea is a major scifi/fantasy book?

there wolf posted:

Yeah, but I always got the impression that wasn't that big a deal till Harry Potter came along and people started scrambling for way to call it an unoriginal rip-off.

Inspector Gesicht posted:

I can't think of any David Mitchell except the one who was a contestant on Numberwang.

there wolf posted:

Are we doing a bad sequel/later in the series theme? I was pretty pissed off with Well of Ascention. Mistborn makes it pretty clear who the hero of book two is/should be, and yet she's spends a good chunk of it totally paralyzed by self-doubt and indecision. And then an honest to god evil twin of her love interest shows up and she can't choose between them! Turned me off Sanderson completely.

Rough Lobster posted:

Everybody hosed the pig's face.

Okua posted:

]

Carnival of Shrews posted:

Pratchett and Gaiman's Good Omens is roughly the bit in bold, but written for laughs. It's one of the few collaborations I've read where the result feels like a successful 50:50 hybrid of each author's style. Not a bad book at all. As always with anything touched by the hand of Pratchett, Hell is a demented bureaucracy...and Heaven is also a demented bureaucracy, but far more condescending.

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

that's why people don't like Ready Player One

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.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

In my experience, the main difference between black and white nerds is that black nerds like Dragon Ball Z more.

Inescapable Duck posted:

I mean, just have a drat fantasy setting where they also invented computers and guns if you want them that badly. Or just do Fallout.

Though there's a fun loophole usually used in anime where it's set on another planet that happens to be in a Wild West stage of incomplete/aborted colonisation so you can have wildly varying culture and tech levels without having to have a contrived post-apocalypse scenario. (though it doesn't always stop them anyway)

Jerry Cotton posted:

Farts and poo is basically a genre of children's literature.

Calaveron posted:

I was just catching up on the funny pictures thread when I ran into this


EDIT: And I'm sure I was also near his gross nerd poetry but I ain't reading that to make sure it's that so good luck finding it

chitoryu12 posted:

Also he has Indiana Jones having more movies after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but none of the other "holy trilogies", which ends up being seriously lol after Fury Road revolutionized action films.

Mr. Sunshine posted:

I got the Joe Haldeman "Peace and War" trilogy for my birthday. The first book, "The Forever War", is a sci-fi story about the weirdness of waging war across thousands of light-years against an alien enemy you cannot understand. Due to relativistic fuckery, a single battle that takes a few hours for the participants takes decades or centuries back on earth. The protagonist participates in a total of three battles. Every time he comes home the society he encounters is more and more alien. When the war ends he's the oldest human being in the universe, and has been at war for a thousand years.
There's some strange things in the book, like how it starts out in 1990 with space gates and power armour

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

You could probably get a decent series of books about what's-his-face the doctor vampire living through the centuries and getting called in to solve crimes or some poo poo.

Dabir posted:

The old, really good ugly ones.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

The joke goes that Tolkein invented fantasy languages and then wrote novels for them to exist in.

Tolkien posted:

The invention of languages is the foundation. The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.

Runcible Cat posted:

Serephina posted:

The second option, clearly! Gave us such classics as Discworld's Josh Kirby covers, and this.

Hellequin posted:

Philip K. Dick.