I can finally resolve an argument that's been sitting for two years on this thread by presenting a piece of conclusive evidence that I found.
Back in 2014, I mentioned in this thread that I was reading the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy by Weis and Hickman (Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning) for the fourth time. There are few novel series' I read that many times, so you can see I loved that trilogy a lot. I mentioned that in my third and fourth reading of that trilogy, I inserted Dragons of the Dwarven Depths into the proper chronological point (between Autumn Twilight and Winter Night). I thought that book was a fun addition which was fairly true to the original Chronicles.
In 2016, I mentioned Dragonlance again, prompting SmiloDan to say...
No matter what you do, DO NOT read Dragons of the Dwarven Depths.
It will ruin Dragonlance for you.
Raistlin actually says "You can bet your biscuits!" :-O
In 2017, SmiloDan trashed the book again, saying...
The Dwarven Depths kind of ruined DL for me. :-( It has A LOT of whiny bickering--and it's kind of obvious it's being used as filler. I'm pretty sure I'm never reading another Dragonlance novel because of it. And I'll probably never re-read the first 2 trilogies, either. :-(
Also, RAISTLIN said "You bet your biscuits!!!!"
Of course, I did my best to promote the book, but I had to admit that I didn't remember any line like "you bet your biscuits." I would confess that would be a terrible line for Raistlin, not right for his character at all.
Well, now I'm reading the Dragonlance Chronicles a FIFTH time, which places it among my favorite series' of all time (if the number of times reading one is an indication, as I feel it is). Once again, I'm inserting Dwarven Depths into the right chronological point. In fact, I'm nearly finished, having only the one-page Afterword (just a note from the authors, not a part of the story in which Raistlin would speak any word of dialog) left to read. (Again, the fact that I will have read the book THREE times places the book - in my estimation - above those second-tier Dragonlance novels such as Weasel's Luck, Flint the King, and The Kinslayer Wars.) During this third reading, I kept a sharp, wary eye open for "You bet your biscuits."
And I can tell you now with certainty that NO ONE EVER SAID "YOU BET YOUR BISCUITS" THROUGHOUT THE NOVEL!!!
Undoubtedly, SmiloDan was thinking of a line in Book 1, Chapter 13 (on page 136 of the hardcover edition). Raistlin says the following: "Of all the stupid stunts you have pulled, this takes the biscuit."
Raistlin was speaking - unjustly - to Caramon, accusing him of doing something he hadn't truly done. I say THAT'S PERFECTLY IN CHARACTER FOR RAISTLIN!
(And if you regard the conflicts between the PCs as "filler" then the original trilogy has the same kind of "filler" as well. But that intra-party conflict has always been part of what made Dragonlance so fascinating. Or at least, that's the way I perceive it.)
So I continue to champion and recommend Dragons of the Dwarven Depths.
|
Finished reading The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers and started on By The Sword (Repairman Jack #12 by Paul Wilson).
I read this book due to an upcoming trip to Vienna. I honestly do not have all that much to say about it - it was an entertaining, solid little piece, with touches of humor, action and weirdness. Never too emotionally impactful, rather predictable and not terribly original, it was still energetic and fun. I'd not exactly shove this one in people's faces and yell at them that they must read it, but I had a good enough time.
I must ask - has anybody read the more well known Tim Powers books? are they similar to this one in tone and style?
'A Mencken Chrestomathy', or H.L.'s Greatest Hits. I find him very entertaining to read, despite some rather insurmountable philosophical differences, but he's not much of a historian.
Also, 'The Moonbeam Roads', by Michael Moorcock, which was OK, but I can't say it was a favourite.
Man! I no longer check these boards regularly, but I happened to come in time for this.
I must ask - has anybody read the more well known Tim Powers books?
Well, you frequent this thread, so I expect you heard that I number The Anubis Gates among my 4 favorite novels of all time. I mentioned it on these boards time and time again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
I never read The Drawing of the Dark but I'll tell you this much: The Anubis Gates was certainly NOT predictable.
I never read Last Call. Maybe I should give that one a try.
|
Finished reading The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers and started on By The Sword (Repairman Jack #12 by Paul Wilson).
** spoiler omitted **
I must ask - has anybody read the more well known Tim Powers books? are they similar to this one in tone and style?
As others have said, they are not. His more recent work (e.g., Last Call, Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather) have been...I suppose the best way to put it is to say that Powers excels at building settings in which apparently-insane people are actually well-adjusted to the truth of the world. Declare was something of a departure from that, but it's an excellent bit of supernatural spy fiction.
The last book I read was Particularly Cats by Doris Lessing which was a lot sadder than I expected, but had its light-hearted moments.
Lots and lots of dead cats. :(
Now reading Brust's Teckla but not reading very quickly for a variety of reasons.
|
|
Alright, thank you to all those who answered about Tim Powers. I suspected that such a well known and respected author must have something more going for him than what I saw in Drawing of the Dark. I added Anubis Gates to my TBR :)
Finished By The Sword (Repairman Jack #12, by F. Paul Wilson) and am tumbling with some bewilderness through The Ninefox Gambit (Machineries of Empire #1, by Yoon Ha Lee).
This one revolves around a pair of mcgufins that four seperate factions are trying to collect, both of which holding some great cosmic power. Most of the people chasing it don't even know what that power is, just that they need to have it. This is a very tired trope in this modern age of superheroes chasing Ininifty Stones, yet Wilson works his usual magic here and creates a story that I couldn't help but munch on like a can of Pringles. The prose slides by, the pacing is perfect, Jack as likable as ever. Some actions, some trickery, some supernatural horror, some new well conceived characters - the usual deal.
|
|
Turned over the last page of The Ninefox Gambit (Machineries of Empire #1 by Yoon Ha Lee) and, taking a gulping breath, dived back into Malazan with House of Chains (Malazan Book of the Fallen #4 by Steven Erikson). Life is kinda hectic with an exciting new job that comes attached to a boss basically frothing at the mouth on delivery times, so this billion page beast of a book might take a while to finish!
I didn't like The Ninefox Gambit, but I am thankful to it for letting me experience this adult sense of childish wonder.
The premise can actually be written succinctly and clearly - a far future in which hyper advanced mathematics allow boundless technology that only works if society is shaped a certain way. Each stable version of a society is based on a "calendar". Holidays, traditions and social structures enable the use of "exotics" - a technology leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. This naturally results in extremely strict and brutal societies in which any deviation from the norm is punished with barbaric severity. Imagine our world if all electrical devices stop working if somebody somewhere does not celebrate Christmas in the correct way.
The setting is new and interesting, and the plot is, on paper, not at all bad. Prose is serviceable and characters are clearly defined. On most technical levels I give this novel a good grade.
However, it just felt... cold... to me. I was never emotionally invested. Maybe the culture was too weird for me, maybe the sparse and unconventional style (that has very little emphasis on story structure considerations such as build up and payoff) just wasn't for me. I'm not sure what exactly went wrong, but something did.
I'm not sure if I'll continue with this. Maybe in a couple of years, but I have very low motivation to find out what happens next, and the book does stand reasonably well on its own. I'd only recommend it to serious weirdness junkies.
I recently watched the new The Name of the Rose TV miniseries, which has prompted me to start rereading the novel. Eco's prose style can be challenging at times, as he very much enjoys showing off his erudition, but it's the sort of esoteric nerddom that I really enjoy.
I don't enjoy all Eco equally. I reread this one and Foucault's Pendulum every few years. (The latter makes me jones to run a weird conspiracy game--but also humbles me at seeing how much of that material Eco can juggle and still tell a coherent story.) I also greatly enjoyed Baudolino when I read it for the first time a couple years ago. But I found The Island of the Day Before to be both impenetrable and agonizingly slow, and couldn't finish it.
Eco's prose style can be challenging at times, as he very much enjoys showing off his erudition, but it's the sort of esoteric nerddom that I really enjoy.
Have you ever read Stephen Donaldson? If you enjoy running off to your dictionary every once in a while as you read, Donaldson (particularly his Thomas Covenant series) will definitely scratch that itch.
'Monkey' by Wu Ch'en-en, trans. Arthur Waley. I thought it was ace.
Have you ever read Stephen Donaldson? If you enjoy running off to your dictionary every once in a while as you read, Donaldson (particularly his Thomas Covenant series) will definitely scratch that itch.
I've read the first Thomas Covenant book and loathed the protagonist so much that I'll never touch that series again. (I don't recall disliking his Mordant's Need duology, but that was so long ago that I don't really recall *anything* about those books.)
For me, Eco's appeal is the way he deep dives into obscure history and ideas--medieval science and theology in Name of the Rose, the Prester John myth in Baudolino, and just about everything remotely tied to the occult in Foucault's Pendulum.
I also own one volume of Eco's prose essays (Serendipities) that showcases his fascination with (and intensive knowledge of) the history of ideas (which is pretty much the common thread in his fiction, too). I'd highly recommend it to anyone who wants a more bite-sized sample of his work--though his essays are not exactly light reading, either.
Have you ever read Stephen Donaldson? If you enjoy running off to your dictionary every once in a while as you read, Donaldson (particularly his Thomas Covenant series) will definitely scratch that itch.I've read the first Thomas Covenant book and loathed the protagonist so much that I'll never touch that series again. (I don't recall disliking his Mordant's Need duology, but that was so long ago that I don't really recall *anything* about those books.)
For me, Eco's appeal is the way he deep dives into obscure history and ideas--medieval science and theology in Name of the Rose, the Prester John myth in Baudolino, and just about everything remotely tied to the occult in Foucault's Pendulum.
I also own one volume of Eco's prose essays (Serendipities) that showcases his fascination with (and intensive knowledge of) the history of ideas (which is pretty much the common thread in his fiction, too). I'd highly recommend it to anyone who wants a more bite-sized sample of his work--though his essays are not exactly light reading, either.
I will give you, the character of Thomas Covenant is not for everybody. For some reason, I can tolerate him, but when I went to read Donaldson's SF "Gap Cycle" the protagonist is treated so brutally I could not continue with the series.
I'll have to look up the Eco essay that you're talking about; it sound like a good read. Thanks for the lead!
|
I read the first chronicles while in high school.
Yes, Covenant is an @$$ who thinks everything is in his mind and actions have no consequence, but the story is engaging and he does come through in the end.
The second chronicles expanded the world and and showed Covenant trying to correct what was wrong, but it is like he is an emotionless automaton.
I have tried three times to read the final chronicles, but I have never been able to get past the first few chapters. While I do like Linden Avery, I just can't stand his son and it puts me off my reading every time. I just can't bring myself to read about him.
'Piers Plowman' by William Langland.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Now that I've finished rereading The Name of the Rose, and read a couple of new gaming acquisitions, I can finally get back to rereading Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi. I first read it in college for a paper in an Asian Lit in English Translation class, and have read it once or twice since then. I acquired a nice hardcover copy cheaply at a book sale last year, to replace the battered paperbacks I used to have. It's a huge book--2" thick in hardback, or 5 volumes in paperback--but definitely worth the read to anyone interested in feudal Japan. And if you've ever read Musashi's The Book of Five Rings, Yoshikawa's novel is a must-read for historical context.
Also on an East Asian theme, I'm re-reading 'The Water Margin'
|
|
Finished listening to Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky) and started on The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins).
Where the book shines through is with the second thread - the story of the rise of a civilization of hyper intelligent spiders, engineered by a long forgotten human civilization and watched over by a single ancinet setallite orbiting their planet. Tchaikovsky does an incredible job of showing how alien the spiders are to us while making you care about their woes. The story follows the spider across millenia, and they have a very different path to technological and societal advancement than us humans. Fascinating stuff.
The only thing keeping this book back from being a classic is, to me, the somewhat detached writing style. I never quite felt 100% invested in the book because the narration (both the prose and the voice acting) was somewhat... cold. Distant.
There are other issues - in the human side of the story, I can't figure out why the PoV character was chosen, as he is very passive and not very impressive, and his inner world isn't distinctly more interesting than that of anyone else around him. I kep expecting him to have some sort of impact on the story, but this never happened.
Anyway, if you like big idea SF, do yourself a favor and read this book, it's a treasure trove :)
Finished listening to Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky) and started on The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins).
** spoiler omitted **
Have you read Tchaikovsky's SHADOWS OF THE APT series? Very unique and interesting fantasy series (and long at ten books, but completed) mixing standard epic fantasy, steampunk and kind-of bugpunk. Very good and underrated.
Have you ever read The Famous Five? I am currently on The Famous Five, it's actually an amazing book to read. It for children but one can also go for it if looking for the adventure. This book is basically written by Enid Blyton.
|
|
Have you read Tchaikovsky's SHADOWS OF THE APT series? Very unique and interesting fantasy series (and long at ten books, but completed) mixing standard epic fantasy, steampunk and kind-of bugpunk. Very good and underrated.Finished listening to Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky) and started on The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins).
** spoiler omitted **
I've heard good things of it - however, being four books into Malazan Book of the Fallen, I'm not exactly aching for new ten book series at this very moment :)
|
|
Finished reading Liar's Key (Red Queen's War #2, by Mark Lawrence), and next up is Broken Angels (Kovacs #2 by Richard K Morgan).
To a pretty great degree I think this is Middle Book Syndrom - almost everything that took place was incidental to the overall plot, and only in the very last few pages did the book get to the next plot point. Some imoprtant information is uncovered, but in the form of flashbacks to the past of the ancestors of the characters. While interesting, these don't really count as advancing the plot much...
Second there's Jalan. Very few characters can hold a candle to Jorg of Ancarath, and Jalan isn't one of them to me. I applaud Lawrence for going the full distance with him - the guy way and remains a cowardly lout who stumbles into heroism, and I've never seen the concept carried quite so far. Nothing seems to be able to reform him or toughen him up. However, this just isn't as fun to read about for me.
Anyway, I liked Liar's Key. It had a ton of good stuff - The Wheel of Osheim, The Lady Blue, young Alica and Garius, and even some unnecessary yet fun cameos from The Broken Empire. Not much of Snorri breaking faces this time around, but some rather crazy set pieces offset that handsomly.
Looking forward to the Wheel of Osheim and to telling this world godbye (to make room for more Mark Lawrence books, of course!)
'To Demons Bound', by Robert E. Vardeman and Geo. W. Proctor.
A novel featuring a bargain-basement version of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, where all the female characters were one-dimensional angry busty sexpots and the torture never stopped. Also featured the phrase 'Wet and asquish came death', so unlikely to be reissued as part of the Fantasy Masterworks series.
'The History of Magic', by Eliphas Levi.
It's rubbish.
|
I finished reading Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. My friend who wrote his doctoral thesis on this has been asking me to read this for many years.
This was a strange one..Without giving too much away, this is a WW2 meets Ludlum on acid novel. It begins with a man who has an unusual reaction to V2 rockets: they give him erections...But ,he has his erections days before the rockets fall at trysts that later become bombsites. Forces in intel are aware of our man's sensitivity and keep him under surveillance.
It gets weird after this, however once you decide to accept the premise, it does not disappoint
In recent years, I've dabbled a bit with fiction about the Old West. Last year, on this thread, I described Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. Here's a link to the post.
Now I'm reading the sequel, The Return of Little Big Man, which Berger wrote over 3 decades later. It starts off entertaining enough, with the same sense of humor that kept me reading the first book. There's the same cliche of Jack Crabb (the main character) meeting the famous historical figures of the time and getting involved with some of the most famous events of the time, from the murder of Wild Bill Hickok to the gunfight at the OK Corral (and yes, the book explains the apparent contradiction of the first book's assertion that Crabb never met Hickok again).
But then... <yawn> I mentioned that the last 20% of Little Big Man was boring. In the case of the second book, it's the last 50%. When Jack joins Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, the novel goes on and on about his job. Very little of that last half has any plot. Furthermore, when the show travels to the East Coast, it's not a story about the Old West anymore. And obviously, when the Jack travels with the show to Europe, it's even further away. Jack describes his tours of Europe at great length. <snore>
Well, that last half isn't ALL bad. It has a few moments that made me laugh. The first time Crabb works with Sitting Bull has some such humorous moments. The second time he gets together with Sitting Bull, we get a rare moment of plot in an otherwise uneventful narrative. A few other brief passages amused me, such as one that conveys Crabb's impression of New York and New Yorkers.
I wouldn't have thought that just a few moments would be enough to carry the novel, and yet... and yet...
I have yet to find a Western novel that impresses me all that much, as some other historical novels have done, or as MANY fantasy novels have done. But the first Little Big Man novel - and also Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry - despite those books droning on and on, screaming to get edited down - somehow kept me reading to the end. They had enough to keep me hooked, despite my short attention span these days. Now that I'm less than 20 pages away from finishing The Return of Little Big Man, my newfound determination to finish the book welcomes that novel into the ranks of the other two I mentioned.
I'm reading Fools Crow by James Welch for a class (amongst many other books), but I am enjoying it a lot. Set just after the American Civil War in Montana, it follows a young man named White Man's Dog as he comes of age. I'm only about 1/3 the way through, and I'm sure it ends tragically. The writing is crisp and to the point, and it is overall a character study set in a specific time and place.
It's a lot more fun to read than A Short Account by Bartolome de Las Casas.
Relevant to my last post here, from my blog: TBT: Musashi, by Eiji Yoshikawa.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I just finished reading Joseph Carriker's new novel, Shadowtide, and wrote a review for my blog.
(There's also a link in there to my review of his first book, Sacred Band.)
|
|
Had lone and awesome vacation in Vietnam, with lots of time to read\listen to audio while getting from place to place in various crazy kinds of long-distance land transport.
This allowed me to finish reading Midnight Tides (Malazan #5 by Steven Erikson) and get halfway through To Ride Hell's Chasm (by Jenny Wurts).
In the audio front, finished listening to the superb "The Selfish Gene" (by Richard Dawkins) and started on Blade of Tyshell (Cain #2 by Matthew Stover).
It also begins to feel inenvitable to me that weird sexual kinks of the authors of giant epic fantasy stories will start playing into thing as their series progresses. With wheel of time it was hundreds of pages of women spanking each other, among other things. Here though... yeah, sexuality in this book runs a whole gamut of flinch-worthyness that I wasn't even aware was possible. For all you necrophilia fans out there, by all means, get your cold, dirt caked yellow talons on this book as soon as possible!
This is not to say that the book lacks all merit. Tehol and Bugg, a pair of new characters, are some of the funniest I've ever read. Trull is a good main character, with definable traits and understandable motivations, putting him on a high pedastal of quality in this series. Some other characters and set pieces were also really fun, and I'm beginning to get shape of the actual plot of the series, I think. Towards the end there were a few moments of real pathos and tragedy which left an impact on me.
Ah, this series is difficult to love, but seemingly also difficult to abandon...
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It is not often that reading a book would win me a new perspective with which to consider the world. But through excellent and crystal clear writing, Dawkins managed to do that just. The basic premise of his book is one that anyone who knows the concept of evolution just be at least vaguly aware of by intuition - that evolution is a competition between genes, not individual organism, and that the genes that "win" the competition by becoming widespred are those that were better able to exploit the enviornment (composed of other genes) the best.
The book offered two major new insights to me: first, that a gene is the only "immortal" component of bioligy (I will be dead a hundred years from now - but exact replicas of my genes will be found in tens of descendants and descendants of relatives), and that the genes can be considered as players acting out repeting games (in the game theory sense of those terms).
These insights are well explained and applied in various fascinating examples - like "games" between family members. Since I share half of my genes with each of my brothers, a gene for sacrificing myself to save three brothers would be genetically favorable, as on average is would save 1.5 copies of itsel at the price of sacrificng one copy.
Dawkins lays out the science in a way that I believe anyone can undersand, even without any preexisting knowledge of genetics or game theory. He also addreses the moral, philosophical and practical implications of the ideas he's promoting with admirable aplomb. His famous anti-religeon ranting only appears in one chapter towards the end of the book, and even there it is only mildly combatitive. In general his musings on the significance of the Selfish Gene theory on our lives and understanding of the world are precise and insightful.
I think is book is brilliant, and would strongly recommend anybody with even the slightest interest in the subject matter to give it a try. The audiobook is narrated by Dawkins and another woman who's name I forget, and they both do a great job, making it a good choice for the format.
I'm well into Tolkien's The Fall of Gondolin. Being a shorter story that wasn't published during Tolkien's lifetime, it's a kind of half story, half critical treatise on influences and the influencing the story had on his later writing. Since I like the "behind the curtain" stuff, I'm enjoying it quite a bit.
Two things about this and the other post-mortem-published Tolkien stories just amaze me. One is that Christopher Tolkien (J.R.R.'s son) was 94 (!?) when seeing this book through to completion. The other is that he was able to make a full 50+ year career out of shepherding his father's literary legacy. That's some serious dedication right there.
I'm currently re-reading the old GAZ series of gazetteers for the Mystara campaign setting published for D&D by TSR back in the '80s. I'm currently on GAZ6, The Dwarves of Rockhome.
It's interesting how different the writing and rules styles were back then when viewed with modern eyes.
Good stuff.
I started reading Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up today. We built a small addition to our house back in the spring, and the house has not fully recovered from the chaos of shifting stuff around from that. Plus we've been needing so seriously declutter for quite a while before then. We'll see if this helps at all...