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Chairman Capone posted:I always confuse Jonathan Strange with Jonathan Livingston Seagull. They are *quite* different. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is bird Jesus, and only does very limited magic. Man I read that as a little kid and was deeply, deeply confused.
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Sep 17, 2023 19:25
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I meant to compare JS&MN to literature written in Victorian times, not set in Victorian times.
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Sep 17, 2023 23:37
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Thanks, I'm kind of leaning that it may make it more difficult for her to enjoy it and maybe I'll just get the first book. Barnes and Noble also has a cool hardcover of A Wrinkle in Time so maybe I'll get her that too. This is an excellent decision imo
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Sep 30, 2023 14:47
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ooooo yeah the Dying Earth stuff is awesome
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Oct 22, 2023 19:17
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Crashbee posted:Being familiar with the stories I was also very underwhelmed. The one good thing that came from reading it though is that she mentioned using the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes for research, which is a really nice slipcase set that include all the original artwork by Sidney Paget as well as annotations explaining all the context, connections between cases, and the mistakes Watson made, and I ended up buying the whole thing. My favourite Holmes pastiche is the Stephen King story where Holmes's cat allergy renders him all stuffed up and miserable and as a result Watson has a chance to solve the mystery himself. I looked it up: 'The Doctor's case' in Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
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Nov 13, 2023 23:41
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I wouldn't mind reading about Holmes in a lovecraftian setting, but less because he's going to solve the mystery and more because it's so goddamn weird and out of left field he's just like "I have no idea what's going on and no idea where it's going but goddamn is it good to be stumped by a mystery!" This is why I'm tempted by the game 'Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened'. The trailer has a real 'I have no idea what's happening Watson' vibe to it.
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Nov 16, 2023 22:53
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Rags to Liches posted:If you want to get more into Arthur, read The Once and Future King by T.H. White, which is his reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend. I read it again during lockdown a few years ago and thought it still held up pretty well! The Sword in the Stone starts it off and it's a fun read imo. Yeah, it still reads very well. Though it kinda hates women.
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Nov 16, 2023 23:25
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Rags to Liches posted:IIRC it took a lot of that from Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Some, yeah, but it added some more layers, in case there wasn't enough to start with. And was written a lot later. I love the book but it's worth knowing, going in.
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Nov 17, 2023 05:18
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NoneMoreNegative posted:My favourite Richard III related thing: My favourite is how his drat remains were found under the R painted on a car park and then he got a royal funeral
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Nov 18, 2023 02:48
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Zelazny, somehow. Barely touched his stuff.
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Nov 25, 2023 18:14
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Keret posted:Diamond Age had great worldbuilding and then took a sharp turn when Stephenson, yet again, felt the need to have his young female character get sexually assaulted for no good reason except that it was edgy I guess. He seemingly just cannot help himself and it's a real bad look. This is the main thing I remember from the book too because it comes out of nowhere, and means nothing in the story. It might as well not have happened.
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Dec 14, 2023 13:32
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Fivemarks posted:I need some help. I've stopped enjoying things I used to enjoy because I can't find enjoyment in them anymore. Manga and anime aren't doing it for me anymore, Mecha Anime is almost never what I want and it's not the kind of thing that people who look like me get to show up in (Read: Black), except maybe Obsolete. I'm tired of kid heroes and falling into cockpit and Military "Geniuses" who's biggest power is the plot and maybe landslides. LOGH is too politically conservative for me. 'Starbook' by Ben Okri is probably not like anything you've read so far.
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Jan 3, 2024 01:45
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Whirling posted:Fair enough, sorry about that, I shouldn't be rude like that. I'd never say someone shouldn't criticise a book just because the author is an active poster in the thread, but perhaps flinging actual insults at an author isn't going to go down well.
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Jan 6, 2024 01:58
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Cast in Shadow was 99p on kindle so that's going on the backlog
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Jan 6, 2024 18:12
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StrixNebulosa posted:I've read those! ... A long time ago, as a teenager. I barely remember them now. Uh. God my biggest pet hate as a kid and teen was 'books that have dragon in the name but are not about dragons'
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Jan 6, 2024 19:54
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The Vorrh gave me that '???' feeling though I didn't read very much of it, got distracted. I should go back. I really liked what I read.
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Jan 13, 2024 23:49
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Arsenic Lupin posted:An English friend is emphatic that the Rivers of London gets the geography all wrong. I hadn't noticed but I am only a casual visitor to London, I don't live there.
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Jan 17, 2024 05:53
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Finity's End was the first Cherryh I read and I think it's a good intro because it's about a young man being introduced to shipboard life. It's great.
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Jan 18, 2024 20:40
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Exordia is really good, except it touched on some ideas I thought were original and now kinda don't want to use after going on about how much I enjoyed it because I'm afraid people will think I nicked them, hah. For real - your take on those ideas will be different because you are different. An idea isn't necessarily worse because someone else used it first. You know you didn't nick them, and even if you had it'd be the execution that mattered. Don't hesitate to write your thing because you want to be original. Just write the thing. If it's any good it can't help but be original, because you wrote it this time.
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Jan 24, 2024 01:38
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mllaneza posted:metaphorically stalking around it like a live bomb This is an incredibly good way to describe a certain emotional response I sometimes have to pieces of fiction and I am going to use it, thank you
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Jan 27, 2024 14:43
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I dropped Cast in Shadow after a couple of chapters because I couldn't get on with the prose style. And I was being driven nuts by 'I looked over at Shady Guy. He was looking thoughtful. Probably thinking about the event that happened between us that I'm still angry about but won't directly inform the audience of. I saw him looking back at me and I felt furious and looked away and grabbed my knife.' Like, constantly. Just tell me what happened between them stop dropping hints I'm going loving nuts arrghhh ...I might also have just been in the wrong mood to be charitable towards it.
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Feb 12, 2024 21:52
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mystes posted:Why? The sound of thunderstorms is incredibly soothing to me. I have a skill on my echo so I can say 'Alexa, ask ambient noise for Distant Thunderstorm' and just bliss out on the sound of rain and low thunder.
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Feb 24, 2024 01:23
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StrixNebulosa posted:If no rainstorm or thunderstorm is handy, I recommend this website for excellent ambient sound/music: https://mynoise.net/ Yessss my favourite website that isn't this one. e: wait, flightradar. Third favourite.
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Feb 24, 2024 02:55
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Yngwie Mangosteen posted:this is what fully convinced me to read more on the kindle phone app than anything else. I almost literally always have a book now, it's fantastic. I do a lot of this too. I find that I can easily read fiction or lighter non-fiction on the app or on my kindle itself, but for heavier stuff I need an actual physical book to help me focus in.
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Feb 24, 2024 21:04
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trip9 posted:This convo was super interesting/enjoyable to read but it also made me chuckle because the other thread I regularly visit here is the horror movie thread where everyone bonds over some movies where absolutely heinous poo poo occurs and it's totally normal to be like "what's everyone's favorite cozy castration scene". I find From Beyond to be a very comforting movie and I couldn't start to articulate why except that the three leads are all very easy to look at. I think Star Trek is probably closet to a 'cosy future'. Post-scarcity, a generally optimistic outlook.
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Mar 2, 2024 03:22
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I have been binge reading Pratchett. He is immensely comforting because he believes in decency, he knows there's not enough of it, but he demands more. Auden's self-chosen epitaph was "he had a lovers' quarrel with the world" and that is absolutely Pratchett. Neil Gaiman said Pratchett was the angriest man he knew, and I believe it. The theme of his books is 'do better, dammit.' Totally agree on Pratchett. The closest to that I've found, though it's outside genre, is Raymond Chandler. Obviously products of their time (sexist, homophobic, racist though not in the worst degrees I've ever seen) but still about a world that makes it hard to be decent, and a man trying his best to be decent anyway.
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Mar 2, 2024 12:38
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Precisely this. That's the quote I was trying to remember earlier. I've gotten at least half a dozen people to read The Big Sleep just based on the opening paragraph or two. The prose is so perfect to me. quote:It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. Nice. e: Also I heard an interview with Raymond Chandler and his English accent took me completely by surprise
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Mar 2, 2024 18:47
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There's a version of Watership Down read by Roy Dotrice that I adored when I was a kid.
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Mar 2, 2024 21:11
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I also bailed at that point but was already annoyed by the way he talked about leprosy as if it were the 1400s. That said it's been a long time so maybe I just misremember.
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Mar 3, 2024 00:51
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Some American editions of TWITW leave out the chapter "Piper at the gates of dawn" because paganism. Wtf thats my favourite bit
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Mar 9, 2024 14:58
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I just started Priory of the Orange Tree too! Really liking the prose but then I'm reading print. Not sure it'd work for me in audio.
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Mar 16, 2024 13:11
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I didn't find El annoying at all. I found her a *teenager* and she probably would annoy me in person, but I felt tender towards her instead. I wanted her to be okay. She's a kid. I dunno, I'm pretty easily annoyed by protagonists and I liked her.
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Mar 16, 2024 20:30
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I enjoyed Harry Potter up until the last one and I was an adult the whole time. I'm not going to pretend I didn't just because now I see they're shallow and vacuous and they're written by a horrible bigot. I did enjoy them and I get why other people do. These days I'm way more concerned with prose and underlying message and stuff. I was a dope then.
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Mar 19, 2024 16:15
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I don't love the attention paid to the sexuality of underage YT. That combined with the unnecessary sexual assault of the protagonist in The Diamond Age made me get a bit frowny about Neal Stephenson's stuff.
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Mar 22, 2024 05:13
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General Battuta posted:I had not, thank you. drat look at you up there with Susanna Clarke. Could not be prouder to know you even as slightly as posters on this forum know each other.
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Mar 24, 2024 18:37
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gurragadon posted:I just finished The Three-Body Problem on a recommendation from someone working at the bookstore and it didn't really satisfy what I was looking for. I asked for something very heady and philosophical like His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem and while The Three-Body Problem raised some questions, I felt it was too reliant on story and not enough philosophical dives. It hasn't really given me that much to think on. I found the book satisfying and may read the sequels if they are the same quality but maybe you all can help me out more. 'Always Coming Home' by Ursula K Le Guin is something I recommend a lot. It has narrative spattered around but is mostly an anthropological and cultural dive into a fictional people.
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Mar 30, 2024 18:56
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My bestie went to a live reading of Terrortome and he stayed in character for an entire Q&A session afterwards.
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Apr 10, 2024 19:06
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They didn't get Reece Shearsmith to play Mr Norrell so who cares what else they did 
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May 6, 2024 21:22
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Kestral posted:Another fun "map inversion" is to swap the positions of land and water. You get a neat world map that way, with some really interesting climate and terrain. A number of projects have done this, but my favorite is probably Inversia, since it goes a step farther and inverts the height map of Earth, so that mountains become trenches and the trenches become new mountain ranges, etc. Then it starts seriously thinking through the implications of things like the huge basins this creates having bizarrely high air pressure that traps heat and creates climates unlike any on Earth. It's a good time and a relatively short read, hard sci-fi / alien planet enjoyers should give it a look. I really like this Inversia project, this person is odd in a way I deeply appreciate
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May 16, 2024 12:19
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