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Has anyone read the second Bloodsworn saga book, Hunger of the Gods? I enjoyed the first one, but not enough that I definitely want to continue with the series. #2 is higher rated on Goodreads though, which has made me wonder.
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Jan 29, 2024 19:52
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 04:16 |
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Horny and erotic stuff in fantasy is definitely nothing new. But I think there is a new trend of what is basically just YA fantasy (like in terms of style, themes, characters etc) but the author makes the characters 20 instead of 15 so they can call it adult fantasy and have explicit sex passages and extreme horniness and it isn't gross. Those Rebecca Yarros books that blew up last year are a great example of this.
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Jan 30, 2024 20:30
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I read almost exclusively on a Kindle and love it but its important to acknowledge the limitations: black and white, no ability to zoom in on illustrations, maps etc (this is annoying for the Stormlight Archive series, for e.g.), almost unusable for graphic novels, fiddly for footnotes (looking at you, Babel  ), and frustrating to flick back and forth through.
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Feb 3, 2024 02:15
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Exordia is available on Amazon UK, maybe it's just that whatever bookseller you're using hasn't got any copies yet? Both libraries I have access to in NZ have physical and ebook copies, and there's a big ol' queue for them so I won't be reading it any time in the next month probably.
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Feb 6, 2024 20:50
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cptn_dr posted:NZ isn't getting a local release for a few months yet, so I bought it on Kindle and now am waiting for my local bookshop to import a US copy for me. My local library system seems to have done the same, since they've got a few hard copies to go around. I think the UK release is also a bit later, but maybe not so distant that the libraries think it's worth importing early. Wellington also has a single digital copy and Auckland has two. Idk how licencing and poo poo works with ebooks in libraries but if even that doesn't have to abide by local release dates, surely it only hurts the publisher to stagger releases. Why wouldn't they do it simultaneously?
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Feb 6, 2024 21:15
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cptn_dr posted:Broadly speaking it's because we're a very small market who nobody gives a poo poo about, and it's especially bad with SFF. So is it literally just the publisher not getting physical copies sent to bookshops here?
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Feb 6, 2024 22:12
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Looking for some more low stakes/cozy SFF for audiobook listening. I've found that style works better in case my attention wanders. Some stuff that worked well was Murderbot, Wayfarers, Goblin Emperor and the sequels, Legends and Lattes and the sequel. Naomi Novik's stuff would probably fit the bill, especially her two standalone books Uprooted and Spinning Silver.
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Feb 15, 2024 00:28
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Kalman posted:Brain as DFA assumes there's no quantum mechanical effects going on in there, which seems optimistic. Also no emergence, i.e. properties that arise from the arrangement of a complex system that can't be predicted from on analysis of the components.
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Feb 16, 2024 07:48
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zoux posted:Fremen gooners jack without rhythym Children of Goon
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Feb 18, 2024 20:51
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pradmer posted:The Burning God (Poppy War #3) by RF Kuang - $2.99 anyone want to share their reckons on this series? I liked Babel a lot, mostly because the politics of it interested me, but I found the characters bland and the narrative poorly paced.
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Feb 20, 2024 02:00
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Kesper North posted:Muir also has a talent for making horror beautiful, and we see some of that in Exordia too imo I'm not finding anything beautiful about Exordia's body horror, but it sure is good body horror.
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Feb 22, 2024 02:07
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My day job is academic reading which is sometimes very dry and I don't have a choice about reading it and I sometimes have to make conscious decisions to remove distractions. The main ones are to close all my browser tabs, put my phone out of reach, set timers for breaks every half hour (actual screen breaks, not picking up my phone to read something else breaks), and making sure I have music on but it isn't stuff that I'm going to stop reading and vibe to. There's a book I need to get through that I've been putting off for a week now, so I've put together an actual schedule on Tuesday of when I'm going to be reading it, when I'm going to take breaks etc. I feel like that kind of regimentation is a bit hosed up for something you're doing for leisure though. If I'm getting distracted from a book I'm reading for leisure I take it as a sign that the book isn't hitting right and I think about moving on to something else, especially if I'm a decent chunk into the book and it's still a problem. That's not a binary thing though, more just a judgement call.
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Feb 24, 2024 21:05
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Kesper North posted:Grover Hawes I'd love to know if Steve McMichael in that same list was a reference to Sleve McDichael
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Feb 26, 2024 07:18
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Has anybody got recs for Tender Frog Happy Hours books? Some good reccs came out of this, a few pages back: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3900237&pagenumber=896&perpage=40&userid=0#post537795688
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Feb 28, 2024 22:02
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For me, "cozy" is definitely about escapism. But I get that more from traditional/old school narrative arc than anything. Hero's journey stuff, good vs evil stuff, etc. I don't mind as much if there's horror or suffering or uncertainty or difficult choices or whatever along the way, it's a matter of whether I trust the author to deliver good things to good people and bad things to bad people, and ultimately for there to be a clear division. Most YA fantasy still follows those formula, but there's plenty of adult stuff too.
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Mar 1, 2024 19:43
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Arsenic Lupin posted:A stupid grudge I have held for literal decades: There's no gold at all in The Land or whatever it's called. That's the whole point, he brings it with him from Earth. Also my lol story about the Thomas Covenant books is that I read them when I was really young and must've totally skipped the rape bit or not really realised what was happening, because when I found out as an adult it came as quite a shock.
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Mar 3, 2024 02:39
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Mrenda posted:I'm not willing to buy into Becky Chambers again seeing as I've been so unimpressed by the one I'm reading. Can't speak for her other stuff but Psalm for the Wild-Built is a completely unchallenging and very sweet (bordering on twee) novella that you can read in an afternoon. It explores a few interesting SciFi ideas in the background of a story about a person feeling a vague sense of malaise and dissatisfaction despite a fairly objectively fulfilling life. If that sounds like her other stuff then yeah, this one isn't for you either. I didn't particularly like it, but that's mostly because I find eco-utopian stuff intensely melancholy and depressing, given the contrast to our current situation. theblackw0lf posted:Is this showing some scenes from the second book? https://x.com/netflix/status/1765754366479192297?s=46 I can't imagine how this would make a satisfying TV show, unless they heavily edit the narrative.
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Mar 8, 2024 19:26
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What's with the snobbery over YA fic and "aged up YA fic"?. I love me some YA fic. It's like how sometimes when you're hungry you just want to smash some maccas, you know? I'm not going to act all guilty for reading those Rebecca Yarros books. ("Aged up YA" is a whole genre now, people call it "new adult" fiction)
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Mar 11, 2024 20:17
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Jimbozig posted:I actually have nothing against it at all. I'm the same way and will read YA when I feel like it. I read the first Percy Jackson book since my kids are into it, although that's middle grade, not YA. (It turns out that Percy Jackson is absolute trash writing, but that's independent of it being middle grade.) Ugh yeah I read the first Percy Jackson book a few months back ahead of reading it to my kid and the prose is just awful. But whatever, it's a cool story and I think he'll love it in 6 months or so. When he's 7 or 8 I just want him to enjoy reading. If you've got primary or middle school aged kids I can't speak highly enough of the Frostheart trilogy by Jamie Littler. So good, really cool and seamless world building, so well pitched for kids that age, and not in the way where it's just kind of devoid of broader themes beyond the most basic poo poo like "bravery" or whatever. Just in a way that those more abstract themes are made accessible and simplified a bit.
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Mar 11, 2024 23:17
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El was definitely an Angsty Teenager but I found her perfectly tolerable because of her very tangible character development over the course of the novels. Especially in the first book I liked the depiction of El's the transition from that mid-teen self-absorbed angst towards more relational understandings of the self and others. But it also avoids a pitfall of media that depicts that stage of people's lives, which is to have characters make that transition too fast, so they go from angsty teen to (psychologically/morally) fully mature, healthy, self-accepting adult over the course of a single school year or something. So yeah you have to be able to tolerate her not becoming a full adult by the end of the third book, she's still a kind of annoying 18 year old or whatever by the end. There's plenty to criticise about the books imo. The characters are very one dimensional, the first person viewpoint coupled with huge exposition dumps makes for long clumsy passages, and the plot of the whole trilogy is driven just by the very shallow core concept of "what if Hogwarts but real consequences" (which IIRC Novik has openly said is what she set out to write?). It just isn't convincing and I found it annoying just how much mental/plot/world building gymnastics went into justifying that core concept and the kind of community/society that would make the choices leading to a school like that. The magic system is cool though, and the way power and privilege play out through the magic system.
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Mar 16, 2024 20:29
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:SF & F Megathread: I'm Sorry You Had a Bad Time Playing Dnugeons and Dragon ftfy
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Mar 17, 2024 19:42
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pseudorandom name posted:Harry Potter was successful because it was narrowly targeted at a specific age bracket and teachers/other adults shoved it in as much of the relevant audience's faces as possible because they were just desperately happy that kids were reading any books at all. If you were a just a little bit too old for them or you had read literally any other books at all, you could tell they were rotten as they were being released and the whole phenomenon was just mystifying. You're extrapolating wildly from your own experience here mate. Harry Potter was very broadly popular, it wasn't a result of adults shoving it down unwitting kids' throats. Lots of kind of mid books get really popular, Harry Potter is just that par excellence. Twilight is another good example.
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Mar 19, 2024 05:24
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trip9 posted:Are there any good books making use of the idea of an "infohazard"? Seems like fun conceptual fodder for some sci-fi. Exordia makes use of the concept.
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Mar 21, 2024 20:11
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Naomi Novik's schtick is very much about putting an interesting spin or inversion on common tropes, and she does it really well. But the more she tries to stretch that out the thinner the concept gets and the more the narrative has to be written in service of the concept, rather than the other way around. That's why imo her best novels are her standalone ones. However she's also just a really engaging writer so it's not like her weaker stuff is bad. I still read all the temeraire books. It's definitely a weird series. They reminded me of comic books or serialised novellas, but instead each one is a full length novel. The biggest crime they commit is spending 8 or 9 or however many books building towards this big climax and then the big final showdown all happens off screen. Like she literally skips the final battle with Napoleon where they defeat him. She just documents their preparations and does a few scenes where the characters are taking breaks from fighting, and then skips to the end. It's genuinely one of the least satisfying conclusions to a series that I've read.
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Mar 23, 2024 20:04
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buffalo all day posted:If your problem with Gideon was “the plot is too propulsive” or “the main character is too compelling” then Harrow will definitely fix those problems. This is true of Nona, but not Harrow imo. But yeah for real if you didn't really like Gideon, I don't think you'll like Harrow. At its core it's a very similar story.
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Mar 26, 2024 18:32
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On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, has anyone finished the Cradle series by Will Wight? My interest (and the quality) has cratered after the big tournament in book 8 so I don't think I can be bothered finishing the series unless it picks up again.
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Mar 31, 2024 02:27
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Yeah it's like a tiered system that the characters advance through and the top level before ascending to godhood is about exerting your will directly on the world, then the gods it's all about predicting the future and the bad guys corrupt and distort natural laws so the good guys can't predict it accurately and poo poo.
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Mar 31, 2024 06:53
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Gaius Marius posted:Buy or Steal, never rent. what about libraries
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Apr 5, 2024 08:46
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pradmer posted:The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JVQ6DHK/ This one piqued my interest when it came out, has anyone read it? General Battuta posted:Really liked this book, the audiobook was a delight. Couldn't get into Song of Achilles but this one did it for me! Agree, much better than Song of Achilles!
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Apr 7, 2024 20:55
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Max Gladstone's latest in the Craft Sequence, Wicked Problems, came out today. I've got a pile of other books I want to get through but I'll be adding this high up in the pile.
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Apr 9, 2024 20:21
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If you can appreciate books purely for the sci-fi concepts then yes 3bp is worth reading. But the characters suck, the author has very weird ideas about gender and women, and the exposition is done almost entirely by characters going on 5-10 page monologues in which they explain everything like a robot. The overall narrative... Interesting. You never really expect the major plot points, but in a good way I guess. Honestly it's weird that they got so popular, which is a testament I guess to how interesting some of the science fiction concepts are.
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Apr 26, 2024 08:12
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Re: language in fantasy books, I know there's a balance to be struck between using a sort of "neutral" English, having in-world aphorisms and profanities and slang and poo poo, but also not making the characters sound inhuman. But the result is always that pressure from publishers and editors means "neutral" English is very American. That's why one of the things I appreciated most about the locked tomb series is how they're written in a NZ vernacular and it's even totally justified in-universe.
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Apr 28, 2024 20:57
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Ravus Ursus posted:Is that what the gently caress is happening in here? Not major spoilers really, but the main characters are all canonically New Zealanders or cultures descended from the same. So retroactively applying a NZ accent is more accurate. The author is a kiwi, also. Book three is another pivot in style yes, and it's quite fan service-y for the first 3/4 of it and then the actual plot kicks back in. So if you haven't enjoyed Gideon and Harrow, Nona probably isn't going to hit right.
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Apr 28, 2024 21:20
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NmareBfly posted:Suggestions for good book club fare, on the lighter (or shorter) side? In terms of the genre we've read How to Lose a Time War and the Ted Chiang short stories in addition to Dune but I think the last one only flew because of the movie. Someone in this thread recommended Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro recently, which I just finished. It was a really easy read, not too long, and ultimately uplifting in message even if I think it was the most  book I've read.The Spear That Cuts Through Water was excellent too, but I'm not sure it'd make for great book club fare? It's very highly stylised, and some people I've recommended it to bounced hard off the style.
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May 3, 2024 11:27
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 04:16 |
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pradmer posted:
this gets a solid recc from me. It's a really interesting mix of fantasy and magical realism in a SE Asian-ish setting, that deals with religion and cults and family and multiculturalism and the banalities of fascism
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May 5, 2024 20:26
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