Set |
Just started Thieves' World. Finding it hard to believe I'd somehow never read this before now.
Fun stuff. Is that the shared-world setting based off of Tales of the Vulgar Unicorn? If so, I remember it being pretty decent, although, somewhat hit-or-miss, in the way that shared world anthologies (like the Wild Cards series) can be, at times.
Lord Snow |
Have been listening to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms on audio lately, and sadly I report that I have decided to quit halfway through this one. The fault lays partly with the previous Audio I listened to, Proxima, which I didn't like either and frustrated me by not paying off at all when I stuck with it all the way through. My willingness to endure an audiobook I don't really like is just too eroded at the moment.
All I encountered in this book is a pile of cliches and rehashed ideas, with a political intrigue story that manages to feel more like a family drama - mostly because all of the action takes place within a lofty palace and the characters scheme against one another without the reader ever seeing the practical effects of their actions on the greater world. Not helping is how the world is centered around the main character, who becomes very important to all secondary characters even though we never feel that she actually strongly cares about anything that happens. We also get a somewhat corny Twilight style romance that I suppose is supposed to appeal to fans of such genres but doesn't really do anything for me.
All in all, I found myself barely able to find any element of the book that caught my attention or appealed to me. I feel like the book has absloutly nothing new to offer and doesn't perform the classics nearly well enough for me to overlook that.
SmiloDan RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32 |
Long train journeys mean lots of reading, so am also 3/4 of the way through 'Perdido Street Station'. I like it an awful lot; you can tell he was in the SWP, though.
SWP?
I'm re-reading Perdido Street Station too. I forgot how stereotypical the set up was (the protagonist gets hired to do a job by a mysterious benefactor; the other protagonist gets hired to do a job by a different mysterious benefactor).
But the world building is so over the top, it's amazing.
Comrade Anklebiter |
Limeylongears wrote:Long train journeys mean lots of reading, so am also 3/4 of the way through 'Perdido Street Station'. I like it an awful lot; you can tell he was in the SWP, though.SWP?
The Britishiznoid Socialist Workers Party.
He resigned in the wake of their sexual assault scandal.
He was active in the short-lived International Socialist Network, but resigned from them with their other celebrity writer (well, less so in these circles) Richard Seymour, over, well, you can read for yourself:
Sex, Power Play, and Trotskyism
Don't know where he went after that.
SmiloDan RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32 |
Lord Snow |
Breezed through Infernals (Repairman Jack #9) in half a week, and gearing towards finishing Guns Of Avalon soon.
This one focuses on family drama. Having Jack's father killed off so quickly and randomly felt bad after spending an entire previous book in the series rooting for him to survive an encounter with The Otherness. Having Tom die was kind of OK, though.
Wilson's writing often seems to verge on childish (with exclamation points and conversation tones used when they really shouldn't be) and lacks depth. It is, however, incredibly easy to read and thus very suitable for page turners. Given this lack of depth one would think characters would be very flat, but Wilson constantly surprises me with deft and accurate characterization, constructing a very good psyche for a large array of people types. I really like how many things about those characters are left unsaid, but are still important parts of their personality.
This surprising depth really saves the book for me, as Tom felt like a very real person, making the focus on him engaging enough to carry a book.
Still, I find myself really hoping that the next book in the series brings back some more cool supernatural elements and lore.
A pet peeve is a final remark - I don't like how The Necronomicon (err, sorry, The Compendium Of Srem) is handled here. In true Lovecraftian horror, gaining knowledge is always part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The mere presence of the book should be manacling, and systematically reading through it should be maddening and dangerous. Yet here, the Compendium is an important tool, a source of knowledge the characters use to get out of tricky spots. I feel like this misses a bit of the point with this kind of story.
Kirth Gersen |
Is that the shared-world setting based off of Tales of the Vulgar Unicorn?
From what I understand from Robert Asprin's afterword and the publishing dates, Tales (1980) was the second collection published, after the original Thieves' World (1979) turned out to be a hit. They were followed by Shadows of Sanctuary, Storm Season, The Face of Chaos, and a ton of others. The whole series gets called "Thieves' World," which lends a bit of confusion.
Looking at the contents lists, individual authors' quality and participation varies quite a bit, with a lot of no-name second stringers showing up more often in the later volumes. Marion Zimmer Bradley and Poul Anderson both have stories in the original volume, but apparently didn't like sharing their characters (Lythande, in the case of MZB) and/or had other commitments, and never collaborated with them again (Anderson did write more Cappen Varra stories as well).
thejeff |
Set wrote:Is that the shared-world setting based off of Tales of the Vulgar Unicorn?From what I understand from Robert Asprin's afterword and the publishing dates, Tales (1980) was the second collection published, after the original Thieves' World (1979) turned out to be a hit. They were followed by Shadows of Sanctuary, Storm Season, The Face of Chaos, and a ton of others. The whole series gets called "Thieves' World," which lends a bit of confusion.
Looking at the contents lists, individual authors' quality and participation varies quite a bit, with a lot of no-name second stringers showing up more often in the later volumes. Marion Zimmer Bradley and Poul Anderson both have stories in the original volume, but apparently didn't like sharing their characters (Lythande, in the case of MZB) and/or had other commitments, and never collaborated with them again (Anderson did write more Cappen Varra stories as well).
It also turned into a bit of a pissing match between Cherryh and Janet Morris for awhile, IIRC. I liked their characters, so it didn't bother me, but it turned some readers off.
Kirth Gersen |
It also turned into a bit of a pissing match between Cherryh and Janet Morris for awhile, IIRC. I liked their characters, so it didn't bother me, but it turned some readers off.
IIRC, those two collaborated together on most of the "Heroes in Hell" anthologies, too, so it must have been relatively amicable off-page.
I admit to having a personal bias against authors who habitually work as part of a twosome (Janet & Chris Morris, Hickman & Weiss, etc.).Set |
Breezed through Infernals (Repairman Jack #9) in half a week, and gearing towards finishing Guns Of Avalon soon.
** spoiler omitted **
While I love, love, loved The Tomb, Repairman Jack's first appearance...
thejeff |
thejeff wrote:It also turned into a bit of a pissing match between Cherryh and Janet Morris for awhile, IIRC. I liked their characters, so it didn't bother me, but it turned some readers off.IIRC, those two collaborated together on most of the "Heroes in Hell" anthologies, too, so it must have been relatively amicable off-page.
I admit to having a personal bias against authors who habitually work as part of a twosome (Janet & Chris Morris, Hickman & Weiss, etc.).
Yeah, I think it was. They were mostly just one upping each other and making Sanctuary nastier in the process.
Kirth Gersen |
I always feel like they should establish themselves first, then worry about more difficult tricks like collaborative writing. It's even worse when there's a "junior partner" who's leaning on the senior one -- the only time I've ever seen that work is when Fletcher Pratt took L. Sprague deCamp under his wing.
John Woodford |
I take those on a case-by-case basis; Debra Doyle and Jim Macdonald, e.g., have taken what started out as Star Wars fanfic from the mid-80s and turned it into an entertaining series of books. That's entirely different from the sort of sharecropping that Arthur C. Clarke and Anne McCaffrey (among others) did with novice authors.
Lord Snow |
Lord Snow wrote:Breezed through Infernals (Repairman Jack #9) in half a week, and gearing towards finishing Guns Of Avalon soon.
** spoiler omitted **
While I love, love, loved The Tomb, Repairman Jack's first appearance... ** spoiler omitted **
I don't want to go book by book because I don't know how far into the series you got, but statistics from the first four books for example would be that Jack helped 4 male clients and 3 female clients (well, 4 females if you count both aunts in the first book, which I wouldn't because they hired him together), of which one female and one male were killed, none of them for disobeying Jack (one time death by monster attack that no one could have foreseen, the other for literally trying to jump into the Otherness).
In later books Jack starts losing more clients as the noose that the alley and the otherness tie around him begins to tighten, but this is more about supernatural forces manipulating events than anything else.
The books do get repetitive in some ways, of course, but I read a couple of them a years, many months apart, so it was never a problem for me.
Samnell |
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I'm on a podcast again. Part one for anyone who missed it. Less political dealing and more parties falling apart in this one.
In book news, finished up River of Dark Dreams yesterday. It's really good, and about the only survey work that's not just about filibustering which integrates it in the southern landscape, but it takes a surprisingly long time to get there. That's doubly weird since Johnson seems to have set out to do it from the start. The other 2/3 of the book are still great, but about half of it feels like it belongs in some other work. I wonder if he had a good portion written before he hit on the question of seceding to, rather than from, as a way to organize the work.
Mother shared my podcast with some ladies she sews with, which led to one of them loaning me a local history of Leavenworth, KS. I didn't ask; it just came into my hands. Looks like it's a fairly standard, member of the genre (heavy on genealogical details, not much analysis) but I'll find some time to look it over. Just not right now. Instead today I begin Frederickson's The Black Image in the White Mind.
Judy Bauer Managing Editor |
Just finished the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which I loved (Jemisin's language reminds me of Patricia McKillip), and now have The Fifth Season on order. Also finished Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, which I enjoyed, but wanted to be longer and more complex (it was a novella). Hopefully this will be a recurring character who we'll see more of.
Now I'm diving into Storytelling with Data (spoilers: must be read in color, uses the term "upskilling") and making a second stab at Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (I now have it on Kindle so no more juggling multiple bookmarks on the bus).
Irontruth |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Great Gatsby. Last time I read it was 20 years ago. Coincidentally, 20 years ago last month I was at the unveiling of a statue in downtown St. Paul of Fitzgerald, went to a whole bunch of lectures, readings and debates that went along with it.
It definitely reads differently now that I'm older. I'm really falling in love with his prose. His construction of the story is something I'm quite fond of as well.
Like 20 years ago though, I have to write a paper on it later.
Aaron Bitman |
3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Many times before on these boards, I've mentioned the books that first turned me into a fantasy freak as a child, the Oz series by L Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz, The Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, et al). I've read the 14 major Oz books at least four times each.
Now I'm reading the series for what is arguably the fifth time. I'm currently on the eighth book, Tik-Tok of Oz.
Readerbreeder |
I'm now currently reading The Swarm, the first in a trilogy Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston are writing about the Second Formic War, if anyone is familiar with the "Enderverse". I've always enjoyed Card's writing, but some of his ideas (leadership in particular in this book) are becoming more and more explicit in his writing as time goes on. I'm hoping it doesn't reach a point where it takes me out of the story.
Lord Snow |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm now currently reading The Swarm, the first in a trilogy Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston are writing about the Second Formic War, if anyone is familiar with the "Enderverse". I've always enjoyed Card's writing, but some of his ideas (leadership in particular in this book) are becoming more and more explicit in his writing as time goes on. I'm hoping it doesn't reach a point where it takes me out of the story.
Reading Card politically is definitely not the best way to enjoy his books to the fullest. He has some... quirks.
Doodlebug Anklebiter |
Was talking to my ADHD-afflicted friend after work about the 2/3rds of "At the Mountains of Madness" and, while listening, he typed it into youtube and discovered this low-budget animation film that we watched (and now I'm not sure I want to finish the story):
At the Mountains of Madness - Short Animation Movie
Then we watched Rats in the Walls which wasn't included in the volume I am (was?) reading.
MMCJawa |
Finished the 4th volume of collected Clark Ashton Smith works. Lots of Zothique stories in the volume (the stories are in chronological order of publication, and the first Zothique story appears in volume 3). Overall pretty solid; by this point CAS is working on more novel material than some of the generic pulpy fiction of his earlier works. Theirs also a bit more of a poetic/Dunsanian fantasy feel to many of the works. This may or may not work for the reader; I admittably thought some stories were light on character and plot, being a bit too heavy on description.
Of note though this volume includes "The Charnel God", which was recently referenced in the last Pathfinder AP volume, and features the first appearance of Mordiggan, an Old One who was statted up in the issue.
TarSpartan |
I just finished "I Will Fear No Evil" by RAH. It could have been a great book had it been a few hundred pages shorter. The beginning was great, the middle kind of meh, and the end good, but entirely too rushed. I've come to that conclusion about a lot of RAH books, especially his later ones. He has some great story hooks, but doesn't quite know how to finish them.
thejeff |
I just finished "I Will Fear No Evil" by RAH. It could have been a great book had it been a few hundred pages shorter. The beginning was great, the middle kind of meh, and the end good, but entirely too rushed. I've come to that conclusion about a lot of RAH books, especially his later ones. He has some great story hooks, but doesn't quite know how to finish them.
Plot, who needs plot.
REH had kind of given up on plot by that stage. I just read them to watch the characters sit around and snark at each other :)
Bjørn Røyrvik |
REH had kind of given up on plot by that stage. I just read them to watch the characters sit around and snark at each other :)
[nitpick] RAH, not REH. I can't recall any Howard characters snarking at each other.[/nitpick]
A collection of 'African myths'. The book is fairly old and does not have much by the way of scholarly comment, so I'm not sure how faithful the translations are, if they are amalgamations of many similar stories told in certain areas or any such thing.
Interesting read nonetheless.
Lord Snow |
Gulped down Senlin Ascends, finishing roughly half of it yesterday in one go.
Will be departing for officer training in a couple of weeks, so looking forward to a busy an exhausting six months during which I may barely have a chance to read - and when I do, I might be tired and/or frustrated. As such, I think it may be a good idea to go to my happy place and pick next a Terry Pratchett novel. I have been saving Night Watch for a special occasion...
Bencrofts' self published debut is quite staggeringly good. I've read the debuts of many of my favorite authors, and most of them were far weaker than the author's more mature work. If Bencroft is to follow the same template, we are in for quite the exciting future.
Immediately upon arrival to the vicinity of the Tower Of Babel, Senlin finds his life thrown off course, whirled about scattered, likely never to be the same again. He is not alone in that - The Tower has such effect on all those who visit it. Nothing about the Tower is as one might expect, and the higher you climb, the weirder it gets.
That last sentence is to be taken quite seriously. It is not only true for Senlin, but for the reader. Even one as genre savvy as I truly cannot know what the future holds. And I do not even refer only to the excellent setting - both the world around the Tower and the various floors of the Tower itself - but to the characters. Senlin goes through a steady and convincing transformation as he adepts to his new environment, and I followed with joy as he surprised me over and over with his wit and resourcefulness. The cast that surrounds him is delightful as well, with minor characters being interesting and fun and often not at all what they first seem to be. If I have on gripe in the characterization department, is that in his good natured wish to portray women respectfully and maturely, Bencroft may have gone a bit over board, as his female characters are all quirky and clever and talented in annoyingly similar ways, while the male characters exhibit a much wider variety of personality types.
Aside from the setting and characters, this book features a reach and deep story, with multiple layers. On the surface, Senlin is on a private quest. But he quickly becomes mired in the politics of the the Tower, which themselves are only a surface detail surrounding the mystery of The Tower, it's purpose and origin. the Tower Of Babel functions here as a sort of scifi-like Big Dumb Object, or megastructure. The size of it - not just the sheer physical girth but the immensity of it's history and the grand scale of its machinations - is staggering to think about. And beyond even that layer of the story, there may just be an allegorical one, about the act of climbing the tower. I'll have to wait and see how this evolves in later volumes before I decide if this element is truly there or not, but it feels as if it might just be.
I thoroughly enjoyed every page of this clever story, and I highly and strongly recommend it. Yet even so, it was not quite the transformative, transcendent experience that some reviewers described. Instant classic? Yes, I think so. But it won't unseat The First Fifteen Lives OF Harry August as the best book I've read this year, and it will not rock the genre like A Song Of Ice And Fire did... when held against my highest standards it does fairly well, but it does not outshine other masterpieces.
Keep your eyes on Josiah Bencroft. If Senlin Ascends was any indication, he may well become one of our best contemporary fantasy writers.
Comrade Anklebiter |
Finished the Lovecraft, about a third of the way through Clash of Kings; stalled at Chapter 15, Section 5 of Das Kapital (we've been trying to move the reader's circle to accommodate the comrade from Rhode Island, but we haven't been able to meet up for a while), so I started in on
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution by C.L.R. James
First chapter ("The Property") was pretty good, i.e, horrific.
Review in the American Cliffite journal who used to give me rides when I was a teen
Zeugma |
I finished The Unwilling Warlord, by Lawrence Watt-Evans. The protagonist was quite a passive fellow, and I feel like Watt-Evans wanted to go somewhere interesting with his relationship to the more-active villain but didn't quite get there. It was a light, quick read.
I also re-read Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in honor of her 100th birthday this year. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it, along with The Haunting of Hill House.
Next I'll probably be reading Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage, but maybe not since there are a good 2 dozen books on my nightstand waiting patiently for me to read them.
Samnell |
Polished off The Political Culture of the American Whigs. I like it a lot, but I think he neglected the Southern Whigs almost completely. Henry Clay's in there, but the only other southerner profiled is Alexander Stephens and he's just used as a case study in how the party fell apart.
Shifted over to Michael Holt's The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, which is good but also tediously long. Holt believe you have to know the results of every state election in order to understand Whiggery, so he tells them to you at length. He's lucky to summarize one in under a page and every cycle of elections bring at least a half dozen he wants to look into. It never ends.
Comrade Anklebiter |
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution* by C.L.R. James
*San Domingo Revolution
Coriat |
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Don Juan de Doodlebug wrote:Cool. Did they include "engag[ing] in sexual contact with the bones used to make a tupilaq" part of the construction requirements?I'm shocked - shocked! - to discover that they left that particular detail out.
I cracked open the book recently and was reminded that it takes 20,000 gp worth of crafting materials. In light of the information you provided I'm going to assume that that includes 1 gp worth of bones and 19,999 gp worth of beer goggles.
Plus requiring a 45,000 gp magic item to serve as its heart.
Once you've coughed that stuff up you end up with a CR 4 golem. I forgot that it was so weak.
SmiloDan RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32 |
I just finished re-reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. It took surprisingly long for me to finish. I'm using it for inspiration for my new homebrew steampunk campaign, and a lot of it reads more of a gazetteer of the weird than a narrative, which I found more helpful than frustrating. The florid language and odd place names were also very inspiring. The story itself starts out pretty stereotypically D&Dy (The main character gets hired to do a job; the other main character gets hired to do a job; complications ensue...), but gets down and really dirty with verisimilitude and tragic consequences.
I'm about to start The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross. My new campaign world has a pantheon of evil entities with lots of names, but almost all of them are double-A names, so I'm hoping for more inspiration. :-)
Set |
4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Currently I'm halfway through a collection of four of Jack Vance's books, two of which involve a character named Cugel 'the Clever,' who is ironically named, and tends to leave places running from an angry mob, and with at least one person's life in ruins (or literal flames) behind him, if not an entire community destroyed. I'm reminded that Jack Vance, Robert Howard, Michael Moorcock and Fritz Lieber were some of the inspirations for D&D, in all it's murderhobo glory, and, gosh, this protagonist could give Sterling Archer lessons in clueless selfishness!
In fact, that might make the rest of the book more fun for me, if I imagine him speaking in H Jon Benjamin's voice...
I do *love* Vances descriptive prose and rich world-building and 'high fantasy' setting, which reminds me a lot of the crazy elements that could be found in Leiber's Nehwon or Moorcock's Young Kingdoms. I'm hoping to find more of his books (with very much less of Cugel 'the Clever,' since my interest in the fantastical setting is somewhat diminished by Cugel leaving an inadvertant trail of destruction across it). :)
Comrade Anklebiter |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Finished The Black Jacobins. Excellent read, but I was a little underwhelmed given its reputation.
Also made some creeping progress in A Clash of Kings; Dany just got to Qarth.
Managed to get myself to Sugar Candy Mountain for this peak season, so that's a plus; although, thus far, I've only been able to get a few pages in each day.
Samnell |
The chapter a day plan I adopted back in the summer is well and truly f&+&ed to hell now. You know why. I'm just into the Taylor administration and I think I might put it up.
Conflicting impulses. The much-delayed podcast project wants reading on the formation of the Atlantic world, origins of the slave trade, etc. The slightly more topical (for now...) inclination is to bone up on white supremacy qua white supremacy in the 20th century.