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I've been doing Hugo voting reading:
Ancillary Mercy, which I liked quite a lot. Wrapped the series up nicely, with a cool space battleish bit and some tense personal confrontations.

SevenEves, by Neal Stephenson, which was certainly interesting, but really dragged. Near future, humanity's attempt to ensure some survivors of an apocalyptic storm of meteors resulting from the destruction of the moon. Cool premise, some cool characters and plotlines, but all of it embedded in way too much orbital mechanics and technical detail. At some points running a couple pages of exposition before we get a page of people doing stuff, then back to more exposition. Then 600 pages in, we finish the prelude and jump 5000 years forward. And spend about 100 of the remaining 200 pages describing the new society and the cool things they've built.
It's been awhile since I've been able to enjoy a new Stephenson book. This didn't change that. Shame, because I really liked Diamond Age and Snow Crash.

Also, for the 1941 Retro Hugos:
The Ill-Made Knight (part of the Once and Future King) Far more twee than I remembered it. Too many asides to the reader, somehow both condescending both to the reader and the characters.

Currently in the middle of Slan, one of the classics that I'd never read. Holds up pretty well as an adventure story, if nothing else. I suspect a lot that was new and exciting at the time is now kind of stale, but it still reads well.

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SmiloDan wrote:

Good to know. Just as long as it isn't GRRM long. ;-)

(I'm pretty sure the Adversary Cycle is complete, right?)

Yes, it is finished and quite massive, moreover so if you read the extra stuff (there's a whole trilogy of young Repairman Jack stories - like, teenage Jack. I don't think I'll read them). However, you can easily fit three FP Wilson books in one GRRM book, so funnily enough I think A Song Of Ice and Fire would end up being about the same length as the Adversary cycle...

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Yeah, definitely long term goal material.

I'm waiting until SoIaF is finished before I re-read what I have of them. I don't want to be Wheel of Timed. SOOOOO glad I never read those!


thejeff wrote:

I've been doing Hugo voting reading:

Ancillary Mercy, which I liked quite a lot. Wrapped the series up nicely, with a cool space battleish bit and some tense personal confrontations.

SevenEves, by Neal Stephenson, which was certainly interesting, but really dragged. Near future, humanity's attempt to ensure some survivors of an apocalyptic storm of meteors resulting from the destruction of the moon. Cool premise, some cool characters and plotlines, but all of it embedded in way too much orbital mechanics and technical detail. At some points running a couple pages of exposition before we get a page of people doing stuff, then back to more exposition. Then 600 pages in, we finish the prelude and jump 5000 years forward. And spend about 100 of the remaining 200 pages describing the new society and the cool things they've built.
It's been awhile since I've been able to enjoy a new Stephenson book. This didn't change that. Shame, because I really liked Diamond Age and Snow Crash.

Also, for the 1941 Retro Hugos:
The Ill-Made Knight (part of the Once and Future King) Far more twee than I remembered it. Too many asides to the reader, somehow both condescending both to the reader and the characters.

Currently in the middle of Slan, one of the classics that I'd never read. Holds up pretty well as an adventure story, if nothing else. I suspect a lot that was new and exciting at the time is now kind of stale, but it still reads well.

You thought SevenEves dragged? I thought it read like an edge of your seat, worldwide extinction level event techno-thriller. And then the last section got all the more awesome!

I guess I'm just saying I totally appreciated the way Doctor Doob's point-of-view narration personalized the first two sections, and really enjoyed the OSR hex crawl of the third section, but no harm, no foul if you liked a different book more. :)


Hitdice wrote:
thejeff wrote:

I've been doing Hugo voting reading:

SevenEves, by Neal Stephenson, which was certainly interesting, but really dragged. Near future, humanity's attempt to ensure some survivors of an apocalyptic storm of meteors resulting from the destruction of the moon. Cool premise, some cool characters and plotlines, but all of it embedded in way too much orbital mechanics and technical detail. At some points running a couple pages of exposition before we get a page of people doing stuff, then back to more exposition. Then 600 pages in, we finish the prelude and jump 5000 years forward. And spend about 100 of the remaining 200 pages describing the new society and the cool things they've built.
It's been awhile since I've been able to enjoy a new Stephenson book. This didn't change that. Shame, because I really liked Diamond Age and Snow Crash.

You thought SevenEves dragged? I thought it read like an edge of your seat, worldwide extinction level event techno-thriller. And then the last section got all the more awesome!

I guess I'm just saying I totally appreciated the way Doctor Doob's point-of-view narration personalized the first two sections, and really enjoyed the OSR hex crawl of the third section, but no harm, no foul if you liked a different book more. :)

How much of the first two sections (~600 pages) did Dr. Doob actually narrate? I liked bits of it. I kept wanting to like the whole thing, but I wanted more of the pov narration, more actual plot & character development. Every time I started to get into it, we got another section on the new tech toy or orbital mechanics or something.

Maybe too much technothriller and too little science fiction for my taste?


'The Coming Of The Terrans' by Leigh Brackett

'English As She Is Spoke' by Pedro Carolino

An anthology of stuff from the Renaissance, which has made me want to read 'Don Quixote' again

And 'Heroes And Villains' by Angela Carter

A cross between JG Ballard and Jane Gaskell, hence superb.


Gave up on Puleo's book. Dove into footnotes elsewhere and found a total of two books on the caning, one of which is a documentary history. (So it's an anthology of primary sources.) What put me over the top was checking JSTOR and finding out the academy couldn't even be asked to give him a negative review. The books I've got on order now have one review (positive, but complains that the book is short and probably aimed at harried grad students) and citations in actual trustworthy books.

Got Slavery in the South: A State By State History, which isn't quite a pile that steams but also isn't great. Was recommended to me by a blogger and I was eager to get some state-level detail that wasn't South Carolina or Virignia-specific. The focus on technical details of slave law, Reconstruction, and so on had me really into it. Waited almost three weeks to get the damned thing, but I was stoked.

By the end of the introduction I knew I was in trouble. It's a textbook, which is less than ideal and I was not told, but I'll live. Just in there I found repeated incidences of putting things quite badly in the lovely technically correct, deeply misleading sense. It's not necessarily that they were lying, but they clearly did not put thought into some things at all. Slaves are repeatedly called "minions."

And it's just redundant. They've got one chapter up front that lays out the general shape of things. Most of it is rehashed in every state writeup, frequently in as many words. Every chapter was sure to tell you that the slave code insisted that baptism didn't free the slave, which is something they also told you was in every slave code in the opening survey. When new detail is added, there's no indicator of just why it's particular to a state so you're left wondering if it's actually a state particularity or if it's just where they chose to insert something.

Analysis? You'd hope for some, but there's pretty close to jack beyond some bald assertions. They say Floridian enslavers were probably not as brutal as enslavers elsewhere, but nothing backs that up; they don't even tell you the bare bones of why they think so. They organized the damned book to frustrate the reader doing any of their own. It's strictly alphabetical order with minimal cross-referencing between states. So even the distinctions between Upper and Lower South are lost, to say nothing of the more subtle shades between the Atlantic coast and the Gulf. They would have done far better just to order things by statehood or first introduction of slaves.

There are citations, but they're pretty basic. You get an author and then you're pitched to a works cited at the end of a chapter. These are largely works I'm unfamiliar with, but I have a lot of trouble believing that there's not a more recent state history than the early 1900s for most of these places.

Dammit, this could have been so much better. What's there isn't awful, when the authors do their due diligence and think about what they're typing, but it's a waste. I'm going to use it as an occasional reference at best. Glad I didn't pay a lot for it.

A slavery scholar I've recently become acquainted with through reddit's AskHistorians recommended Huston's Calculating the Value of the Union to me. So I'm reading that. It's about how ideas about property rights, specifically the exaltation of the elitist, hierarchical, slaveholding model of property rights, brought along the Civil War. I'm only a chapter in but it's really good. There are plenty of well-deserved swipes at the sort of free market fables usually presented under the rubric of property and a very nuanced treatment of the subject itself.


Finished up Huston's Calculating the Value of the Union. It ended up leaning on economic history much too hard for me overall, and his claims to novelty go a bit beyond the customary level of scholarly exaggeration, but it's still decent for what it does. Ultimately -and the slavery scholar who recommended it to me agreed on this- it's much more valuable as a very thorough version of a pretty standard argument than for "new" insights. The idiosyncratic insistence on treating property rights in slaves as a semi-discrete subject independent of slavery is grating, particularly when the references drift to just "property rights," but that's a more stylistic choice than an interpretive one, really.

That means it's on to an essay collection: Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation. Academic reviews are positive and one of the editors is Matthew Mason. I liked his Slavery & Politics in the Early American Republic quite a bit.

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Samnell wrote:

Finished up Huston's Calculating the Value of the Union. It ended up leaning on economic history much too hard for me overall, and his claims to novelty go a bit beyond the customary level of scholarly exaggeration, but it's still decent for what it does. Ultimately -and the slavery scholar who recommended it to me agreed on this- it's much more valuable as a very thorough version of a pretty standard argument than for "new" insights. The idiosyncratic insistence on treating property rights in slaves as a semi-discrete subject independent of slavery is grating, particularly when the references drift to just "property rights," but that's a more stylistic choice than an interpretive one, really.

That means it's on to an essay collection: Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation. Academic reviews are positive and one of the editors is Matthew Mason. I liked his Slavery & Politics in the Early American Republic quite a bit.

Your reading habits put me to shame :P

Anyway, back to Grongork the Might Swinger Of Swords and Conqueror of Women 3: This Time With Bigger Spider Monsters!


That sounds alright :)

Most recently I have read:

The Newgate Calendar vol 3 (18th century True Crime)
'The Magic Christian' by Terry Southern, which I didn't like much
'The Warlock of Firetop Mountain' by Ian Livingstone (and possibly Steve Jackson), which I did like
And 'Swords Against Darkness vol. 4', which I liked even more.


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I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

Excellent book that gets into the nitty gritty details of why some civilizations advance technologically faster than others, laying the route causes for these differences on the vagaries of geography: areas with easy to domesticate plants and animals and have suitable climates are more likely to have people settle down and start tending food crops, which in turn results in populations increases, and development of specialized artisan and rulership classes, which allows further innovations. Furthermore, the development of large populations and close contact with domesticated animals favored the evolution of new deadly diseases, which people in the old world evolved resistance to. Finally, orientation of geographical features can allow or inhibit the spread of technology and agriculture; Sahel adapted crops fair poorly for instance in equatorial Africa, so never reached South Africa where they would have been useful crops. Similar problems in geography prevented Andean crops and llamas from making it to Mexico, and lengthened the progress of Mexican crops to fertile areas of Eastern North America. The book provides a good summary of human dispersal and walks through each continent explaining the specific circumstances that led one civilization to fare poorly when contacted by another.

Guns, Germs, and Steel was an interesting read, but I feel like dipping into some fiction before another nonfiction book. So I just started The Jack Vance Treasury, an anthology of the author's more prominent works. Only on the first story so far (The Dragonmasters), and already enjoying it.


Lord Snow wrote:
Your reading habits put me to shame :P

I am very boring. :)

Also I've actually struggled a bit to settle into a comfortable reading routine for non-fiction. For a while I was just doing a two hour session once a week. I'd drive my mother to her knitting group and read while she socialized. Before that I tried to do 100 pages a day, but that was overambitious. Neither one makes for fast progress when it comes to actually doing the thing. My present milestone is a chapter a day, by which measure I'm currently three days ahead.

I know there are academics who can work through one book in the morning and another in the afternoon. They are robots.

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Finished Legacies by F. Paul Wilson. It was OK. Reminded me of a cheesy 80s action movie more than anything. It even happened during Xmas like Die Hard, Die Harder, and Lethal Weapon.

Speaking of Finishing, I'm reading Volume the Third of the Finishing School series by Gail Carriger: Weaponry and Waistcoats. The girls are growing up, so there are more romantic entanglements now. And their first classes in Seduction. I'm not sure how appropriate that is for a YA novel. I was going to recommend the series to my niece, now I'm not. It's still really good for grown-ups, though.

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MMCJawa wrote:

I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

Excellent book that gets into the nitty gritty details of why some civilizations advance technologically faster than others, laying the route causes for these differences on the vagaries of geography: areas with easy to domesticate plants and animals and have suitable climates are more likely to have people settle down and start tending food crops, which in turn results in populations increases, and development of specialized artisan and rulership classes, which allows further innovations.

I read aboutan interesting competing idea, that it wasn't the greater agricultural productivity of some areas that lead to the growth of advanced civilizations, but rather the use of grains vs. tubers as staple crops.


RainyDayNinja wrote:
I read aboutan interesting competing idea, that it wasn't the greater agricultural productivity of some areas that lead to the growth of advanced civilizations, but rather the use of grains vs. tubers as staple crops.

They seem to be presenting an oversimplification of some of what Diamond was saying. His premise wasn't focused solely on the productivity in terms of calorie production, but also on the relative value of the crops in other respects.

For example, from a meal of potatoes, you get maybe 6% of your protein needs; wheat is giving you more like 15%. The fact that the wheat is more transportable is an added bonus when it comes to supply lines for an army -- alluded to in the link you sent but not well-developed.

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Samnell wrote:
Lord Snow wrote:
Your reading habits put me to shame :P

I am very boring. :)

Also I've actually struggled a bit to settle into a comfortable reading routine for non-fiction. For a while I was just doing a two hour session once a week. I'd drive my mother to her knitting group and read while she socialized. Before that I tried to do 100 pages a day, but that was overambitious. Neither one makes for fast progress when it comes to actually doing the thing. My present milestone is a chapter a day, by which measure I'm currently three days ahead.

I know there are academics who can work through one book in the morning and another in the afternoon. They are robots.

A couple times in my life I read through 300+ pages in the same day. In all cases this was done as a marathon, segregated alone in my room and making intimidating growling noises at anyone approaching the area (or so they tell me). Needless to say, these are all-day affairs.

So, you can probably feel pretty amazing about reading hundreds of pages a week, at least by mortal standards.


Lord Snow wrote:
So, you can probably feel pretty amazing about reading hundreds of pages a week, at least by mortal standards.

I reject your "mortal" paradigm and substitute mine own. :)

Going to be finishing up Contesting Slavery tonight. Completely failed at my goal of a chapter a week by reading mostly two and then, erm, six or seven yesterday. I've probably got about thirty pages to go, maybe forty, once notes are taken out.

After that it's going to be Eric Foner either way. I am shockingly overdue to read Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. It'll be that or The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Probably the first, with the second to follow.


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Lord Snow wrote:
Samnell wrote:
Lord Snow wrote:
Your reading habits put me to shame :P

I am very boring. :)

Also I've actually struggled a bit to settle into a comfortable reading routine for non-fiction. For a while I was just doing a two hour session once a week. I'd drive my mother to her knitting group and read while she socialized. Before that I tried to do 100 pages a day, but that was overambitious. Neither one makes for fast progress when it comes to actually doing the thing. My present milestone is a chapter a day, by which measure I'm currently three days ahead.

I know there are academics who can work through one book in the morning and another in the afternoon. They are robots.

A couple times in my life I read through 300+ pages in the same day. In all cases this was done as a marathon, segregated alone in my room and making intimidating growling noises at anyone approaching the area (or so they tell me). Needless to say, these are all-day affairs.

So, you can probably feel pretty amazing about reading hundreds of pages a week, at least by mortal standards.

That sounds like my high school and undergrad life. Sadly my daily reading is almost always limited to a half hour here and there on trains or waiting for trains. And that's assuming I am not reading for work or research.


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MMCJawa wrote:


That sounds like my high school and undergrad life. Sadly my daily reading is almost always limited to a half hour here and there on trains or waiting for trains. And that's assuming I am not reading for work or research.

With time taken by kids, family and work, I am left with a to-read pile that became several to-read piles. The only extended time I spent reading continuously in the last 5 years was when I was in hospital for two weeks. Other than the meds and hospital food, I enjoyed my gloriously uninterrupted reading time and was able to finish off an armful of books. I was probably the only patient in the ward who was not looking forward to leaving...

Scarab Sages

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The Diabolical Miss Hyde by Viola Carr
Prudence by Gail Carriger

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Charles Scholz wrote:

The Diabolical Miss Hyde by Viola Carr

Prudence by Gail Carriger

We know which shelf in the library you've been hanging out! ;-)

I'm going to start the Prudence series once I'm done with the Finishing School series.

Scarab Sages

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Charles Scholz wrote:

The Diabolical Miss Hyde by Viola Carr

Prudence by Gail Carriger

That should have been Imprudence, the second book.

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Lord Snow wrote:
Petty Alchemy wrote:

I'm getting near the end of the First Law trilogy, which has been good fantasy all-around.

It makes fun of itself at one point in a very thinly veiled way, not sure I liked that. Maybe the author was having a late night when he wrote it in. You have to be realistic.

What are you referring to?

** spoiler omitted **

I thought it was cute, though a bit much. We already get that this trilogy is a deconstruction of the fantasy genre and we don't have to be beaten on the head with that.

Keep reading, though. This third book one is so good it makes the previous two (which I already liked) seem even better. I felt gutted by the end of it. I felt like the fantasy genre has been gutted.

Back a year later, and yup, that was it. I did finish it, and I definitely liked how absolutely horrible everyone is. Went on to read Best Served Cold and The Heroes.

---
Currently I'm reading the sequel to The Black Prism, The Blinding Knife. I like the world building and magic system, it reminds me of Sanderson's work, but the styles are different.

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Just finished Waistcoats and Weaponry by Gail Carriger.

Just started Cold Magic by Kate Elliot.

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Finished Embassytown a few minutes ago. It was wonderful, but I feel like it's time to transition back from all the world-pondering I've read lately to some simple, fun stuff-is-blowing-up books. So - prime time to read Calamity (Reckoners #3, Brandon Sanderson).

Embassytown thoughts:
I went into this experience knowing very little about the book except that it features some exceptionally strange aliens (exots?) and having only read one previous book by the authors, that being Railsea. I enjoyed certain aspects of Railsea a great deal, but it was aimed at a younger audience, which did make the booker lesser overall, or at least less enjoyable for me.

What sparks of promise I saw in Railsea turned out to be a blinding flare in Embassytown. It was strange, certainly, but weirdness is really only the start of it. Embassytown is a broiling story about politics and about power and consequences and the vastness of historical events. More than all it is about language. Now, I'm nothing remotely close to a language nerd, but here the story focuses on the fascinating aspects of it by inventing the surreal Ariekei, the hosts of Embassytown, for whom language is not a set of agreed upon sounds and symbols that are granted meaning by consensus - rather, it is a reference to reality. For them, Language is inseparable from the person speaking it, and a word can have no abstract meaning - it has to mean exactly something specific that exists. This is impossible - anyone can point out how little sense this makes - but these are aliens, and the universe is gigantic and human comprehension is not the arbiter of what is possible or isn't.

I loved that. I also loved the concept of the solution, even if I could not follow the logic behind it all the way through - when the Ariekei came in contact with humans, they figured out a system to make similes out of specific person. They would make a man swim with fished every week, and then they could say, "you are like the man who swims with fishes every week". This is already a change to how they classically use Language, and the characters in the story exploited that to get the aliens to say lies by taking those similes to the next level and making them into metaphor. The idea that a metaphor is a lie that you use to say the truth, that this allowed metaphors to be the bridge for the aliens to expand their thinking and separate language from absoluteness.

Apart from the high concept stuff, I really liked all the technical aspects of the story. The main character has an interesting voice, the writing is unique and flows well, and the story itself is very solid and does a very good job of both serving as a background to the big ideas at the core of the novel while also being a tale worth telling on its own. Revelation and big moments come and go in a good pace, many characters are sympathetic and interesting (even if a lot of the details have to be filled in by the reader based on subtle clues, as the spartan storytelling style of the narration wouldn't allow for long conversations or very descriptive passages). If I have one complaint, it is that I felt some elements were a bit undercooked and didn't really strengthen the story - such as the AI Ehrsul, who sorts of disappears the moment the main conflict picks up.

All in all I really enjoyed Embassytown. Thoughtful, thought provoking, well crafted.

Is this smart or stupid?:
In a story all about language, the initials of the main characters' name are ABC. Should I chuckle or groan? I did both, just in case, but I'm curious to know what others think.

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Probably a little bit of both:

I get the feeling he has a weird sense of humor.

He's one of my favorite authors. I struggled with some of his short fiction, but I really really like his novels.

I should probably re-read Perdido Street Station again. Especially since I'm fixing to run a steampunk campaign pretty soon.


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'Dune' by Frank Herbert

And 'Conan the Avenger' by Bjorn Sprague de Howard.

Grand Lodge

Sandman Slim

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Marculus wrote:
Sandman Slim

Such a fun series! I need to finish reading it.

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I discovered I had missed the last two Taltos novels, so I'm rereading the series to remind myself since I last read he early stuff almost fifteen years ago.


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Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War was great. Don't let the title fool you, it's at least as much about the formation of the Republican party as its ideas. The language shows its age (1970) in a few places. Foner consistently refers to "the Negro" and "the race issue". He would hardly use those terms in the same way, or nearly so often, a decade later.

Fun bit: The a GOP paper in Wisconsin believed that their candidate's name was Abram and told off anybody who spelled it Abraham for a while.

Now it's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, because I've read sections of it a few times over but never done the whole book and I love me some Eric Foner.


Long time, no internet access!

Don't remember where I left off, but recent starts include Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal by Aviva Chomsky and The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution by Leon Trotsky.


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'The Book of the Penis', by Maggie Paley.


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Currently reading The Last Dark by Stephen R. Donaldson. The narrative is much more internal than I remember his first books being when I read them at 13/14, but that's probably from my being (at least theoretically) older/wiser/better read more than 30 years later.

He's one of the few authors, though, who can send me running for a dictionary like I'm reading the 1e DMG for the first time, though!


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Just finished Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. I loved it and it was the first book I've ever read by this popular author. I'll likely start his Mistborn series at some point.

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Professor wrote:
Just finished Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. I loved it and it was the first book I've ever read by this popular author. I'll likely start his Mistborn series at some point.

I'm glad you liked Elantris. I really struggled with it, and then gave up (it might have been due at the library before I could finish it).

I then made it through the first Mistborn novel, but decided not to continue the rest of it. I found it kind of hokey to name a slave race after a style of music (ska), and I had trouble telling a lot of the characters apart. It did have really great fight scenes. Like, really really great Marvel Universe cinematic fights.

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Has anyone read the new Harry Potter yet? I got it, but when I opened it up I found it was a play script. A little LOT disappointed.

I mean, if other authors can turn movie scripts into books, couldn't JK Rowling done the same?

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SmiloDan wrote:
Professor wrote:
Just finished Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. I loved it and it was the first book I've ever read by this popular author. I'll likely start his Mistborn series at some point.

I'm glad you liked Elantris. I really struggled with it, and then gave up (it might have been due at the library before I could finish it).

I then made it through the first Mistborn novel, but decided not to continue the rest of it. I found it kind of hokey to name a slave race after a style of music (ska), and I had trouble telling a lot of the characters apart. It did have really great fight scenes. Like, really really great Marvel Universe cinematic fights.

I enjoyed Elantris for what it was, but Sanderson is the amazing kind of authors who grows better with every book. Not every story he tells is a home run, obviously, but as far as technical skill goes, there's no doubt he came a very long way since Elantris.

Mistborn does indeed have some of the best magical fight scenes in the entire genre, or at least the parts of it that I am aware of. It is also full of immensely clever twists and revelations, an interesting story and an incredibly cool and unique magic system. Side characters are by far the weakest aspect of Sanderson's writing, and that remains true for nearly all of his books (with Warbreaker being the exception). For me, however, the upsides outweigh the downsides by orders of magnitude. Mistborn is an amazing trilogy.

Mistborn has another attraction to it - even though the trilogy stands on it's own, it is merely the first part of an epic series the likes of which has never been attempted (to my knowledge) - the story of that world continues through more books and stories and series, set in analogues of increasingly advanced times. The next trilogy out after the original Mistborn is about a 19th century frontier-America equivalent, with guns and railroads and all. The mega-series will continue with a urban-fantasy-esque segment about 20th century technology, and eventually will even extend to a far-future scifi setting with interplanetary travel. The size and ambition of the story, combined with the high quality of each book, makes Mistborn an insanely appealing series to me.

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Technically Mistborn Era 2 is supposed to be more 1910's. That said, you're understating the scope.

Elantris, Warbreaker, The Stormlight Archives, White Sand, Mistborn, and a handful of stand alone short fiction are all the same series.

Sanderson's said there's about 36 books in the Cosmere series, but he's already had to add a three books to Mistborn (the Era 2 stuff, the second trilogy was supposed to be the 21st century like urban fantasy) so I expect that to balloon up past forty.


'Briefing for a Descent into Hell', by Doris Lessing, which I think is some sort of extended Sufi parable, or something to do with Gurjieff.

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Just finished Cold Magic by Kate Elliot. It was a little erratic, pace-wise, but overall pretty good. Fascinating world building, the heroine/narrator was a little passive, and while the magic is interesting, it's very vague.

Going to start Manners & Mutiny by Gail Carriger tonight. Book the 4th of the Finishing School series, where the heroine is NOT passive at all! :-D


Almost done with the first book of the Destroyermen series. It is a historical fantasy-ish series of a WW2 destroyer getting sucked into an alternate Earth where dinosaurs are still around and two sentient races developed that we don't have on our Earth. One is good, one is bad. What will our intrepid wayfarers do?

So far it has been good.

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Neat! Cold Magic is also an historical fantasy series on an alternate Earth (Ice Age steampunk with feathered troodon "trolls" from the New World). Also goblins, which were not described at all.

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Finished Calamity, thus concluding the Reckoners series by Brandon Sanderson, and started on the much praised Prince Of Thorns (Broken Empire #1 by Mark Lawrance).

Calamity thoughts:
I have reservations about this one.

Let's get the straight up good stuff out of the way first: in certain sections, Calamity delivers on the premise of the earlier books quite well. Atlanta (now Ildithia, the least cringe-inducing name for a city in the series so far) as a moving city made of salt is a great setting for a story, there are some intense action scenes and one fight in particular, a standoff between David and a size-altering epic, is exactly the kind of clever boss fight that I enjoyed so much in the first two thirds of the series.

Unfortunately, every other element of the book is flawed to some degree. The characters are still about as flat as they previously were, with only David managing to be interesting and the others being utterly replaceable. The tragedy of Prof and his downfall/redemption is seriously mishandled, as we get glimpses of emotion surrounding it but never truly feel for him. The ending itself felt seriously rashed and underdeveloped, and could have benefitted from more space to breathe in.

The most serious flaw is the 180 thematic flip of the story from being about super-powered people going crazy to an interdimensional mystery. It turns out that the reason epics got their powers, and the reason they became evil, has a ton to do with some serious cosmic stuff, which is actually pretty cool - I just wish this was set up better in previous novels. We went from a relatively straight forward "find out what Calamity is to beat the epics" to a story rife with parallel universes and supreme beings and alternate versions of the characters, all of which feature very heavily as the central theme of this book. This is too much of a shift of focus, and the characters all take to it like it makes perfect sense, but the reader can't. I can't help but think that Snaderson got bored of the inital premise for the series while writing this, and in his attempt to spice things up with the new inspiration he had for parallel universes sci-fi (in a recent State Of The Sanderson he described a "sequel series" for the Reckoners about a heroic team that travels to worlds on the brinks of destruction and save their populations) and somehow ended up losing site of the identity of the series.

I did appreciate many of the twists and revelations, I did enjoy the read and as usual for the author, I kept turning the pages in a rapid pace. But - this wasn't the ending the series deserved.


The Guns of Empire by Django Wexler in which [not a spoiler] Winter (the main-main protagonist) invade their world's equivalent of Russia. But it's in spring, so that should be fine, right?

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

Lord Snow wrote:

Finished Calamity, thus concluding the Reckoners series by Brandon Sanderson, and started on the much praised Prince Of Thorns (Broken Empire #1 by Mark Lawrance).

** spoiler omitted **...

Mark Lawrence is really fun, if grimdark. It's a really fun series, but almost everyone is super evil or a victim.


Samnell wrote:
Now it's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, because I've read sections of it a few times over but never done the whole book and I love me some Eric Foner.

Wrapped that up. Good but frustrating because I've been over this turf a lot before and I read it right after another Foner, so it felt a bit samey.

Now on to Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone, which is all about the first two centuries of slavery in North America. It's so good.

The Exchange

Now reading Woman with a Blue Pencil, by Gordon McAlpine. It's a post-modern mystery. Imagine Naomi Hirahara meets Dashiell Hammett at a party hosted by Jorge Luis Borges. Or for those readers who only get movie references: "The Purple Rose of Cairo" meets "The Maltese Falcon."

RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32

I just finished Manners & Mutiny by Gail Calliger.

spoiler:
it ends with A LOT of kissing--some of it with a gentleman with an improperly tied cravat!!!!

I'm going to start Killing Pretty by Richard Kadrey, but I'm afraid I'll read it too fast before my library gets the other books I've ordered.

I want to re-read Perdido Street Station and check out Ancillary Justice, but they're on back order at the library. I've got Cold Fire by Kate Elliot on order too, and should get it by Saturday or Monday, but I may also need another emergency book.

Any ideas? I've been reading a lot of YA steampunk and urban fantasy lately, and should probably try to expand my horizons a bit, but still stay within the SF and fantasy genres.


The Rutgers, the State University 2016 Alumni Directory, while listening to a video of President Obama's speech at the University Commencement.

I'm in one of those moods.

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