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Le Guin is my favorite author so I'm looking forward to revisiting this after so many years, and especially after having read and re-read a lot of her later and more refined speculative fiction (the term for sci-fi that is good)
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Nov 2, 2023 02:08
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It's the first of three short novels in "Worlds of Exile and Illusion" if you manage to find that, it's a later publication so may be more likely to be around, I'm pretty sure it's what my own library has
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Nov 2, 2023 02:39
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Jordan7hm posted:I read it in the back half of September. Just now I remembered nothing about it other than that LeGuin is pretty good at writing. Her earlier stuff can get pretty brutal but a lot of the introspection and world building that makes her other stuff stick in your mind for the rest of your life isn't there like it is later. The Word for World is Forest is another one that is quite short and shockingly violent in a straightforward way. My usual recommendation for anybody getting into her stuff, and would be my recommendation for a future book here, is The Lathe of Heaven. Short enough for an evening or two to finish, and deeply weird and touching in a way that you'll never forget.
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Nov 2, 2023 21:35
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Screaming_Gremlin posted:I own Left Hand of Darkness, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. Am I going to want to do so before starting Rocannon's World? Not sure if it really matters at all, or if it is going to feel like I am missing something. You can read them in any order, the Hainish framing is more like an excuse to create all these different situations to really dig into. I'd say do Rocannon's World first because it's so much shorter, and you'll get an idea of how she evolved as a writer over the years. The Left Hand of Darkness is a good deal longer but also the kind of book where you're frequently going to be putting it down mid-chapter to have a good hard think about things
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Nov 2, 2023 22:32
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Dammit now its over and I have to read all of leguin again Was going to ask if you read Birthday of the World in your binge, since that's imho her most anthropological work lol. If you hadn't but want to scratch that itch that's my recommendation, short story collection with one of the more haunting ones of the format I've ever read, The Matter of Seggri But yeah I'm already re-downloading my Lathe audiobook
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Nov 3, 2023 00:03
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Bilirubin posted:Its on the list HA left in the OP but there was a bolus of forums folks who read Lathe (myself included) recently so the timing didn't seem ideal to me. Plus, this one was very much a mod's selection based on discussions two months back, and my own desire to read it. Oh yeah, only book clubs I'd have the same author twice in a row are Kapital ones, and anyway with any luck people will be reading it in any case after reading this. I'll think up some stuff, my only other real "something I'd recommend to literally anybody" books are Bridge of Birds and Guards! Guards!, it'll probably be one of those
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Nov 3, 2023 01:32
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No there was a ton of garbage back then too, Le Guin is just really good. In 50 years nobody will remember the garbage from now and will only remember the good stuff. So it goes. Left Hand of Darkness is probably my favorite of her longform stuff, it'll give ya a big ol  about a lot of stuff
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Nov 16, 2023 01:27
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Semly's Necklace is such a good prologue, it's just so interesting how it throws you into this world by telling you a story that is very familiar to any child but that is laid perfectly onto a very, very sci-fi framework We're coming up on the end of the month, what's everybody think about it? Have you gone on to read more Le Guin?
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Nov 28, 2023 00:17
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Book report time! I finished The Shepherd's Crown as the culmination of my year+ long project to read through all of Pratchett's Discworld novels. I'm conflicted a bit because it's not a very good book on its own merits, but it also couldn't have been because Pratchett never got to actually finish it. I was expecting this to be deeply depressing but it was instead only bittersweet at worst, because it was also a labor of love of the man by the people who put it together on the strength that it is also is just a better ending point for the series than Raising Steam was. My actually controversial opinion is that Making Money was probably the last book in the series that really felt like the old books. Unseen Academicals was fine but just didn't grab me, partly because I think the dynamic between the frumpy but solid character and the flighty but beautiful one was done better in Maskerade, and I was very sad that Agnes Nitt vanished as a character after that one. It had one thing that would come to bother me in the next two mainline books though, a strange and driving insistence that having a useful skill was the foundation of worth and that worth was the biggest thing to strive for. The entire time I could only think "and what if Mr Nutt wasn't miraculously perfect at everything he put his hands to? or "what if goblins really weren't instantly perfect at everything to do with railroads and klax towers, what if they were just okay at them and their salvation demanded tremendous expenditures to bring them back from where the Disc had put them and not tremendous profit from exploiting them as labor?" Would they deserve the mistreatment and oppression then? Would they ever have been offered a place at the table? It felt like a real detachment from the more humanistic tone of earlier books. Snuff was pretty good overall but should've ended at the bonfire, if not a bit before that. Raising Steam felt like an endless stream of monologues with the actual established motivations and peculiarities of characters changing as needed to fit them, ones that would always start with a declaration of who they are. Everybody was walking around with a soap box and waiting for their turn to extoll the virtues of the coming technocratic meritocracy, contrasted with cartoonishly evil villains. It's why I remember these books as the saddest for me, because it was after he found out he would never be able to finish what he had in mind so I think he wanted to fit all the important arcs in. I guess I don't have much to say about The Shepherd's Crown specifically, both because it was what it was and because in addition to being a book it also represented my completing the whole canon and my beginning point for seriously thinking about it as a whole. Pratchett remains my favorite author, tied with Le Guin. His humor and his characters and his worlds are alive, deep, and deeply funny in a way nobody else could match. Guards! Guards! is the book I've probably recommended to the most people, because it's emblematic of his ability to make something real, touching, subversive, and universal with his characters and plots that are firmly grounded and funny even as high fantasy is going on the background. I've moved on to Towing Jehova, a book about God dying and his 2 mile long corpse dropping into the middle of the Atlantic, and the efforts to quietly give him a respectful burial amid the sort of geopolitical and cultural issues you'd expect to come from such emphatic proof of the death of God, which tauntingly enough also constitutes the proof of God's existence (past tense). Also, the down to earth logistics of actually moving something like that and keeping it from being too eaten up by predators and keeping it secret. I'm not far in but so far I get the impression that Morrow wanted to both write a book with lots of details about what it's like to live on and crew a supertanker, while also dealing with some internal religious conflict he was contemplating, which is a fertile bed for something that is interestingly weird. It's a trilogy apparently and the 3rd book's cover is God's skull eternally staring down at Earth from a low orbit so I hope it's good enough that I can justify seeing exactly where the hell he's going with this. Because I was asked for a book report format, I have not reviewed or revised this at all, because I am deeply lazy and a bad student, hopefully it all makes sense. If I didn't know there were a bunch of Prachett fans here I probably wouldn't have bothered and kept it all to myself, so I'm glad this thread exists because I've got very few people irl I can talk to about the sort of books I actually find worth reading.
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Jan 20, 2024 21:36
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Finished Towing Jehovah and now onto Blameless in Abaddon, and I've got to say I'm enjoying these books more than I expected, but most of all I think it's worth saying that before this if you had told me about the theological and academic concept of theodicy (why does God permit evil to exist and flourish) I would've assumed it's nothing more than an easy way to get paid to golf or flick paperclips into the ceiling all day and respond to all entreaties with a big shrug, but in fact it seems to attract a lot of sincere brainiacs who swiftly go on to drive themselves mad with their studies.
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Jan 27, 2024 00:09
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Just finished the book for this month, and it's an all-timer for me. Got everything I like in a book - weird, convoluted, unabashedly sincere, and no longer than it has to be. I ended up listening to the audiobook but I do wonder if the format would've clicked with me sooner if I had read the book instead, still ended up being fine. I first went to check if my library had it, only to discover 23 holds. Usually this means a book is brand spanking new or about to release as a movie, but it isn't new and I couldn't find any mention of anything like a screen adaptation, but I did find this on the wiki page for it: quote:In May 2023, three years after its release, This Is How You Lose the Time War received an unexpected boost in popularity, ascending Amazon's bestseller rankings to number three overall and number one in science fiction.[17] This was because of a viral tweet by a fan of the manga and anime series Trigun with the display name "bigolas dickolas wolfwood" who recommended the book to their followers.[18][19] "I do not understand what is happening but I am incomprehensibly grateful to bigolas dickolas", El-Mohtar wrote in response.[20]
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Mar 6, 2024 15:46
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Enfys posted:I'm really drawing this one out because it's so good it hurts and I don't want to finish it I wish there was more to it too, but the time jumps and the whole thing being very personal and character-driven reminded me at times of Emily St. John Mandel, so I checked what she has been up to and am now reading Sea of Tranquility. Not far in but it's good
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Mar 9, 2024 19:13
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Sandwolf posted:Sea of Tranquility is fantastic and actually improves on what I consider St John Mandel’s weakness to be (her endings are very lukewarm, run out of momentum things usually) Yeah I couldn't even tell you the specifics of the ending of Station Eleven...an airport I think? But it never has bothered me because it's clearly not her focus or her strength as a writer (at that time at least), and her characters are very good. Weirdly enough, the book I read before this, The Eternal Footman by Robert Morrow, ALSO made me think of her writing because a big part of it is traveling a post-apocalyptic America with a theater troupe. The similarities end here however because that's the third book in a trilogy that is just completely unhinged, but played straight enough that you have to force yourself to step back and take a wide view of things before you realize it
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Mar 9, 2024 19:34
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Bilirubin posted:please feel free to start to provide suggestions for next month's book! Have we done Le Guin recently? I'm thinking of giving The Lathe of Heaven a re-read soon because it's one of my all time favorites and it'd be nice to have company, good short book club book too. "Guards! Guards!" by Terry Pratchett is also one I wouldn't mind returning to at all and is something I tell everybody to read constantly. edit - oh duh, like the 2nd to last one lol. Been one of those days. Probably Pratchett then but I'll give it some thought Epic High Five fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 22:30
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