The Book Thread

[Eldan]

So, the "What are you reading thread" or whatever it was called seems to have vanished. I can't even find it searching and it doesn't show up in the last two months, apparently, so I assume it's in thread necro territory. So, let's start a new one.

In my current quest of reading sci fi novels that have won awards, but that I haven't read yet, I got The Space Merchants. Now, I haven't finished it, I'm about two thirds through, but I need to talk about it.

So, what is this book. It's satire, and a pretty biting one. It's also Cyberpunk. Which is astounding, because it was written in 1952, which is at least 20 years before other proto-Cyberpunk works, and 30 years before anyone coined that name for the genre. Now, being written in the 50s, it doesn't feature cyberspace, or computers. Not a single one. But every other element is there.

Megacorps run the world. Costa Rica earns 90 percent of its taxes from a single company, which farms algae in vertical towers. The US has restructured its government so that every company share is a vote, not every person. India has restructured into a corp called Indiastries. Overpopulation is massive. The proletariat live 30 a room in hotbunks, and work 12 hour shifts at jobs they are indentured to. There's even SINs that determine the amount of rights you have, straight out of Shadowrun or Cyberpunk. Ads constantly running on TV screens are absolutely everywhere, plastered on every surface. In the dorms, in transport shuttles, at work places, even inside the "fancy" one-room corpo apartments. Corporate feuds are legally regulated and regularly leave a few dozen employees dead when one company loses a contract to another.

What sets it apart from other Cyberpunk and makes it more of a satire is that the main character is a Corpo. And not just any Corpo, a major ad executive, an utter scumbag and a true believer. Exploit more natural resources, increase the population, create more consumers, create more demand, create bigger markets, expand the consumer base again, rinse and repeat. Good for everyone. His job is writing raunchy limericks to sell coffee. Not just coffee, Coffiest! Everything you love about coffee, plus several new addictive chemicals which are totally harmless!

The plot starts when he is given the new and totally impossible job of selling people on being Venus colonists. Six months aboard a spaceship, followed by living in a tiny bunker for the rest of your life, being slowly cooked alive and poisoned. For no good reason, since there's nothing on Venus anyone wants.

I had to check the front page about once a chapter to make sure this was really written in the 50s.

It's also cited by the Oxford English Dictionary for inventing the terms "3D", "soyaburger", "RnD", "muzak" and "to survey (customers)" used as a verb. Which is astounding.

[Taevyr]

So, the "What are you reading thread" or whatever it was called seems to have vanished. I can't even find it searching and it doesn't show up in the last two months, apparently, so I assume it's in thread necro territory. So, let's start a new one.

In my current quest of reading sci fi novels that have won awards, but that I haven't read yet, I got The Space Merchants. Now, I haven't finished it, I'm about two thirds through, but I need to talk about it.

So, what is this book. It's satire, and a pretty biting one. It's also Cyberpunk. Which is astounding, because it was written in 1952, which is at least 20 years before other proto-Cyberpunk works, and 30 years before anyone coined that name for the genre. Now, being written in the 50s, it doesn't feature cyberspace, or computers. Not a single one. But every other element is there.

Megacorps run the world. Costa Rica earns 90 percent of its taxes from a single company, which farms algae in vertical towers. The US has restructured its government so that every company share is a vote, not every person. India has restructured into a corp called Indiastries. Overpopulation is massive. The proletariat live 30 a room in hotbunks, and work 12 hour shifts at jobs they are indentured to. There's even SINs that determine the amount of rights you have, straight out of Shadowrun or Cyberpunk. Ads constantly running on TV screens are absolutely everywhere, plastered on every surface. In the dorms, in transport shuttles, at work places, even inside the "fancy" one-room corpo apartments. Corporate feuds are legally regulated and regularly leave a few dozen employees dead when one company loses a contract to another.

What sets it apart from other Cyberpunk and makes it more of a satire is that the main character is a Corpo. And not just any Corpo, a major ad executive, an utter scumbag and a true believer. Exploit more natural resources, increase the population, create more consumers, create more demand, create bigger markets, expand the consumer base again, rinse and repeat. Good for everyone. His job is writing raunchy limericks to sell coffee. Not just coffee, Coffiest! Everything you love about coffee, plus several new addictive chemicals which are totally harmless!

The plot starts when he is given the new and totally impossible job of selling people on being Venus colonists. Six months aboard a spaceship, followed by living in a tiny bunker for the rest of your life, being slowly cooked alive and poisoned. For no good reason, since there's nothing on Venus anyone wants.

I had to check the front page about once a chapter to make sure this was really written in the 50s.

It's also cited by the Oxford English Dictionary for inventing the terms "3D", "soyaburger", "RnD", "muzak" and "to survey (customers)" used as a verb. Which is astounding.

Ok, i'll have to put that one on my list, it sounds quite interesting. Especially with that release year.

I've been reading some non-fiction lately, after getting some recommendations from friends: the most recent one I finished was Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", which is a very interesting work on intrinsic bias in thinking, the systems of thinking, expert and layman intuition and such. A really interesting, and at times somewhat confronting, read, considering he makes a lot of use of small "tests/questions" to provide examples.

Now working my way through Harari's "Sapiens", and.... I can tell that it's a quite well-written pop-science book, to the point where calling it pop-science feels slightly insulting, but it definitely wasn't meant for people with a background in history/archaeology or related fields. The biggest thing I got from it thus far, is the realization that a lot of what I saw in my (very) early bachelor studies is apparently "eye-opening" to people I know with the same amount of schooling, who recommended it. Feels arrogant to say, but it feels a bit surreal to find out that historical events and longue-durée themes that I consider basic knowledge is this interesting/novel to other people.

Then again, this must be what (for example) the guy who does experimental particle physics must feel like whenever his field comes up in group conversations. It's just the first time I experience it this closely.

After that, I'm looking to give Clausewitz' "On War" a try: I like political/war theory, and found Sun Tzu's "Art of War" and Machiavelli's "The Prince" quite interesting, so I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy it.

[Eldan]

My current non-fiction is The Ghosts of Evolution, which is about species that seemingly have symbiotic relationships with other species that have died out. Fascinating, but I'm not far enough in yet to comment much.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Just reread Uprooted, a book that is unfortunately hard to describe without spoilers since (in my opinion) the best thing about it is the slow-burn reveal of what exactly is going on, who/what the antagonist is, and what they're capable of. This same quality meant that on a reread it didn't hold up quite as well as other works by the author (e.g. Deadly Education or Spinning Silver), but was still a fun read. The magic is flashy and cool, the characters are interesting and complicated, and the nearby eldritch location The Wood is intimidating as hell. Recommend this to people who like fantasy and/or fairy tales.

Also recently read A Court of Thorns & Roses because one of its sequels was the most recommended fantasy book on Goodreads. Was heavier on romance than I was expecting, but still a fun read. A starving hunter kills a wolf that came between her and the first deer she'd seen in weeks. Unfortunately for her, said wolf was actually a fairy in disguise, and it's not long before his lord shows up at her family's doorstep. Instead of taking her life, he takes her back to his domain as a prisoner, and from there the plot is very Beauty & the Beast, culminating in her having to complete three trials to prove herself (which was a fun read).

As an alternative to completing the three trials, the queen gives her a riddle to solve. However, the riddle was extremely obvious (at least to me). I don't have any trouble believing that the main character wouldn't be able to come up with the solution until the finale; she was under a lot of stress, and riddles did not feature prominently in her education. Where I have trouble suspending disbelief is that the evil queen would gamble her entire reign (and by extension her life) on such an easy riddle.

[halfeye]

So, the "What are you reading thread" or whatever it was called seems to have vanished. I can't even find it searching and it doesn't show up in the last two months, apparently, so I assume it's in thread necro territory. So, let's start a new one.

Good idea but why confine it to books? I'm currently reading about six hours (+ or - 4 hours, depending on how much updates that day) a day of webserials, and pretty much nothing else.


In my current quest of reading sci fi novels that have won awards, but that I haven't read yet, I got The Space Merchants. Now, I haven't finished it, I'm about two thirds through, but I need to talk about it.

So, what is this book. It's satire, and a pretty biting one. It's also Cyberpunk. Which is astounding, because it was written in 1952, which is at least 20 years before other proto-Cyberpunk works, and 30 years before anyone coined that name for the genre. Now, being written in the 50s, it doesn't feature cyberspace, or computers. Not a single one. But every other element is there.

There are two books I feel should be recommended on the basis of your liking this (which I don't remember reading and will read now), "Star smashers of the galaxy rangers", by Harry Harrison and "the Rediscovery of Man" by Cordwainer Smith (there are possibly homophobic aspects to the latter, but he has computers even though he was writing in the 1940s and '50s).

[Eldan]

Just reread Uprooted, a book that is unfortunately hard to describe without spoilers since (in my opinion) the best thing about it is the slow-burn reveal of what exactly is going on, who/what the antagonist is, and what they're capable of. This same quality meant that on a reread it didn't hold up quite as well as other works by the author (e.g. Deadly Education or Spinning Silver), but was still a fun read. The magic is flashy and cool, the characters are interesting and complicated, and the nearby eldritch location The Wood is intimidating as hell. Recommend this to people who like fantasy and/or fairy tales.

Oooh. I haven't read Uprooted, but I did read Deadly Education and its sequel. Which is a book I really didn't expect to like as much as I did, it has so many elements I thought I'd dislike. A borderline Grimdark setting, a protagonist who looks painfully edgy and very woe-is-me at first, a magic high school (sort of), teenage romance, working together through the power of friendship... and yet, it works and it's tons of fun.

I should read more Novik. The later Temeraire novels kind of turned me off her, but her later books are really quite good.

[warty goblin]

Oooh. I haven't read Uprooted, but I did read Deadly Education and its sequel. Which is a book I really didn't expect to like as much as I did, it has so many elements I thought I'd dislike. A borderline Grimdark setting, a protagonist who looks painfully edgy and very woe-is-me at first, a magic high school (sort of), teenage romance, working together through the power of friendship... and yet, it works and it's tons of fun.

I found Deadly Education a bit too, I'm not sure of the word - fanfic-baity maybe? - for my taste. It was enjoyable enough, but I also had not a lot of desire to pick up the sequel.

Recently finished the four main volumes of Margaret Weis' Star of the Guardians series. These are fun, and deeply, deeply odd. What starts as a straightforward Star Wars knockoff takes a violent left turn for parts unknown when it becomes very, very interested in the super-dramatic tragic romance between, basically, Darth Vader and Obi-Wan's sister, but also with loads of allusions to Paradise Lost and Shakespeare. I had a load of fun with these, particularly the fourth one, they're sort of like reading a 19th century Gothic novel version of space opera.


Now on to Tanith Lee's extremely oblique and very long The Blood of Roses, another of her sort of vampire novels. The novel is one of her more difficult works, things frequently dip into surreal dream logic without warning, the plot seems to hardly exist beyond a method to do horrible things to the characters and move them between strange and beautiful and often terrible imagery, and I couldn't for the life of me guess where this thing is going. There seems to be something going on with a religious schism, or a new belief papered over an old, but it's very background to the surreal dreams cape of the main plot. So far I like it, but it wouldn't be my top pick for Lee in maximally weird mode; the Lionwolf trilogy has a stronger plot, and, although still a challenging read, is less baffling than this seems to be.

[halfeye]

I found Deadly Education a bit too, I'm not sure of the word - fanfic-baity maybe? - for my taste. It was enjoyable enough, but I also had not a lot of desire to pick up the sequel.

Recently finished the four main volumes of Margaret Weis' Star of the Guardians series. These are fun, and deeply, deeply odd. What starts as a straightforward Star Wars knockoff takes a violent left turn for parts unknown when it becomes very, very interested in the super-dramatic tragic romance between, basically, Darth Vader and Obi-Wan's sister, but also with loads of allusions to Paradise Lost and Shakespeare. I had a load of fun with these, particularly the fourth one, they're sort of like reading a 19th century Gothic novel version of space opera.

Does anyone else think that the books that Cervantes is railing agianst in Don Quixote sound like fine modern fantasy novels?


Now on to Tanith Lee's extremely oblique and very long The Blood of Roses, another of her sort of vampire novels. The novel is one of her more difficult works, things frequently dip into surreal dream logic without warning, the plot seems to hardly exist beyond a method to do horrible things to the characters and move them between strange and beautiful and often terrible imagery, and I couldn't for the life of me guess where this thing is going. There seems to be something going on with a religious schism, or a new belief papered over an old, but it's very background to the surreal dreams cape of the main plot. So far I like it, but it wouldn't be my top pick for Lee in maximally weird mode; the Lionwolf trilogy has a stronger plot, and, although still a challenging read, is less baffling than this seems to be.

I like The Birthgrave, I found the satanic stuff boring, if she's moved on I'd probably like that.

[Mechalich]

Oooh. I haven't read Uprooted, but I did read Deadly Education and its sequel. Which is a book I really didn't expect to like as much as I did, it has so many elements I thought I'd dislike. A borderline Grimdark setting, a protagonist who looks painfully edgy and very woe-is-me at first, a magic high school (sort of), teenage romance, working together through the power of friendship... and yet, it works and it's tons of fun.

I firmly believe the Scholomance is not intended to be read straight. It's tons of fun because it's absurd - the math fail at the center of the whole premise being a critical indicator - and the protagonist's first person narration clearly leans into this element. The series unfolds as an absurdist black comedy and so long as the reader recognizes this the darkly amusing approach works. Any time the novels present a serious point, the spell breaks and they grind to a halt, but so long as the madness continues to unspool it works. I worry about the third book though.

[Clertar]

I'm re-reading Charles de Lint's Moonheart after over ten years. Still as enjoyable as I remembered it to be.

[Velaryon]

Ironically, I have never gotten less reading done than since I became a librarian. One way I try to make up for it is by listening to audiobooks. Also, as a teen librarian a lot of what I do read is young adult.

The book I most recently finished is You've Reached Sam by Dustin Thao. It's about a teen girl named Julie whose boyfriend Sam recently died in a car crash. Desperate to hear his voice, she calls his phone... and he picks up. Though he really is dead, Julie is able to regularly converse with Sam during the rest of her senior year, which helps her with the grieving process. It's an interesting bit of magical realism, and while I do have a few minor complaints I mostly enjoyed the book. The narration is also pretty well done.

In between other reads I'm trying to make my way through Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson, but it's an enormous book and as I mentioned I don't find a lot of time to sit and read, so it's been very slow going so far. Doesn't help that it's been a few years since I read the previous books so I'm having to try and remember names, and sometimes look them up as I go along.



I should read more Novik. The later Temeraire novels kind of turned me off her, but her later books are really quite good.

I kind of agree. The early Temeraire novels were amazing, but somewhere along the line it got away from the "Napoleonic wars with dragons" premise and became "contrive excuses for Lawrence to travel to different parts of the world and show how nearly every other society better integrates dragons."

[warty goblin]

I progress further into The Blood of Roses. This novel is weird. The plot seems to focus on the machinations of a (sort of) vampire, who I think is motivated by some sort of religious dispute or schism. The whole thing is one Lee's sort-of middle ages settings, with an approximate Christian church, which is in opposition to some sort of strange folk tradition underlying it, the details of which are unclear. A motif of a tree keeps appearing, but what exactly it means, and which religion it belongs to, I don't understand yet.

Beyond that it's also very interested in characters remaking and transforming themselves, often literally - we're up to three people who have created new physical versions of some aspects of themself for some purpose or other, in at least one case without knowing it. Remaking oneself isn't a new theme in what I've read of Lee's work, but this is definitely a different take on it, both in how literally the text treats it, and in how ambiguous to downright negative the text is about doing so; here it appears less a tool of self-actualization than self-abasement or self-escape or perhaps self-manipulation. The effect is very strange, and I'm interested to see where the story goes with this theme.

Also the second quarter of the novel is mostly a prequel/retelling of the first quarter, but from a different character's perspective. This makes certain things in the first section make, well, not exactly sense, but seem less inexplicable. Lee's really outdoing herself with the prose on this one, there's been a couple passages that are just devastating in how perfectly they capture the emotion of an event.

[Velaryon]

My current audiobook is a YA sci-fi horror thriller called Every Line of You by Naomi Gibson. My feelings on it so far are kind of all over the place.

The premise is that main character Lydia has poured all her time and energy into creating an AI named Henry, which is named after her younger brother who died in a car crash a couple years before. Her father abandoned the family, her mother is a nonfunctional wreck who can't even take care of simple tasks like putting money on Lydia's school lunch account, and her former best friend Emma (who was also in the car crash and survived with scars) now hates her guts, so Lydia is basically alone, friendless, and relentlessly bullied. Henry becomes her only confidante, and eventually more than that as he is transferred to a chip and implanted directly in Lydia's body.

I can see a whole lot of influences on this story. The premise definitely borrows from Frankenstein. The entire first act is basically Carrie but with magical computer hacking powers instead of pyrokinesis. Henry can quickly teach himself new skills similar to the "I know kung fu" thing in The Matrix. I've even seen some comparisons to parts of the movie Heathers, though I haven't seen that so can't really speak on it.

It requires a lot of suspension of disbelief and a fairly high tolerance for characters making bad decisions (though in fairness, I think most of the bad decisions are believable for these teens in these circumstances).

I've also learned about some accusations of plagiarism (https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2021/08/05/every-line-of-you/) about this book, which is sad if true. I am mostly enjoying this book, even if I do notice a few flaws and even though I'm not loving the audiobook narration.

[Wookieetank]

Been working my way through Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu, and while enjoying it, finding it a much slower read than his Earth's Remembered Past trilogy. Part of that might be the more technical aspect of the science being presented, where in ERP it was more philosophical with a sci-fi back drop. Whatever the case, still finding it to be a fascinating read, and looking forward to seeing where the rest of the book goes.

[Algeh]

I like The Birthgrave, I found the satanic stuff boring, if she's moved on I'd probably like that.

The Birthgrave was one of her very first published novels, way back in the 1970s, so she grew as a writer quite a bit after that (although I did quite like The Dragon Hoard, which is a very early YA book she wrote). My personal favorites of hers also tend to be some of her earlier works, but I haven't done a re-read recently to see how well they've held up now that I'm older, have read more widely, and have access to a wider and more current range of Queer Stuff, which was otherwise not easy to find in the early 1990s when I found Tanith Lee books originally. (Tanith Lee was one of the first authors I read from the "adult" side of the library starting at around age 11 back in the early 1990s, which gave me some rather odd ideas about "typical" SF/fantasy genre fiction to the occasional consternation of anyone reading my WIPs back in middle school. She also was one of the first authors I read who ever dealt with any kind of Queer stuff or Gender stuff at all, since that was much less present in genre fiction at the time, particularly YA-ish or classic/older stuff which was most of what would get recommended to me.) My favorites from my teen years were the Tales from the Flat Earth Series, Cyrion, Don't Bite the Sun, Volkhavaar, Dat by Night, and the short stories "Crying in the Rain" and "By Crystal Light Beneath One Star". I probably haven't read any of them in the last decade or so, though. Lee always seemed like an author who was at her best at the short story length and many of her longer works either were really compilations of short stories with some kind of framing idea around them.

I haven't read The Blood of Roses yet - I'll have to pick up a copy when I have the energy for that kind of thing again. (The last vampire books by Lee that I remember reading were Dark Dance, Personal Darkness, that series...I think that was back in the 90s?) I've liked most things she wrote, although I was unable to get through The Gods Are Thirsty because it had too much tendency to laspe into French-language poetry. I suppose I could give it another try one of these years.

In terms of what I'm actually reading right now, I think the only "new" book I've had the energy for so far this year (as opposed to a re-read) is Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire back when that came out in January. I'm currently re-reading Barbara Hambly's Darwath books yet again since I just don't have the energy for books with surprises in them right now. When I have slightly more energy this summer, I discovered recently that some, but not all, of Jim Kjelgaard's works have somehow escaped to the public domain (someone must not have bothered to renew the copyright on some of them at some point back when that was a thing?) so I'm going to read several books of his that my local library didn't copies of when I was growing up but which I can now get as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg. He's certainly From A Different Time in terms of sensibilities than a lot of other stuff I read, but I always enjoyed his books as a break from heavier stuff when I was in middle or high school (and otherwise mostly reading Tanith Lee) so I suppose I'll probably enjoy more 1940s books mostly about animals and/or hunting even if they probably don't really hold up in some ways.

I'm also debating buying a Worldcon supporting membership so I can get the Hugo packet and read through all of that this summer before voting. I last did that for 2020 and enjoyed most of it, but it's a big project and I'm just not sure I'm up for that much new stuff this year.

[warty goblin]

It's odd, and probably mostly a sign of own blinkered perspective, but I never really think of Lee's work in terms of queerness. I don't mean that I don't see that it's there - I can't see any way to read parts of Flat Earth and not pick up on that - but for me as a reader it always felt less compelling than her prose, occasionally brilliant plot twists, and overall aesthetic, particularly the stories that stray well outside the bounds of the human. Like I said, this is probably just my own limited self reading her work in a limited, not enormously interested in gender way. That said, I still appreciate that she remains one of the only authors I've read who can render the make body as erotic, though this probably has a lot to do with my not terribly wide reading.

Though I do want to grab a copy of the lesbian erotica she wrote as/in conversation with her nom de plume Esther Garber, simply because having a dialog with your own pen name is a marvelously intriguing piece of metatextual fiction, and I love it when Lee goes fully metatextual.


Finished the first volume of Blood of Roses (its one book, Immanion Press just split their reprint into two volumes). There is a ton going on here, mostly touching on religious themes that I can't begin to comment on here, and also because a lot of it is still extremely oblique. The first section (the book is divided into sections based on viewpoint character) becomes almost completely incomprehensible as anything but a series of apparently random and inexplicable things happening, until the end of the next section which sort of explains them. Though since those explanations are things like that side character being the daughter of the spirit-clone of a previously dead but now re-living woman who was herself an empty vessel created as an Eve figure by an immortal vampire moth, they only make sense in a fairly loose way. This seems to be a pattern continuing into the second volume, that the story is sort of narratively backwards, things happen for reasons that ate explained later but occurred earlier. You, the reader, are adrift in a strange dreams dreamscape world, where anything is possible for their own inscrutable reasons.

I'm also reading an anthology called New Eves, which is a 1990s collection of sci-fi short stories by women, organized by decade. This is a lot of fun, both because it's a nice way to experience some very early amd now hard to find female authors from the 20s 30s and 40s, but also as a look at how the genre has evolved over time. I found the early pulp stories a real ripping good time in the maximally enthusiastic way of good pulp sci-fi. I'm up to the seventies now, and I find the stories are starting to lag a bit. They aren't as fun as the pulps, being more politically focused have aged worse than pure adventure, and most of them feel like a set-up for a novella or full novel that just magically ends at like 12 pages because it's a short story. Still a worthwhile read, and the nice thing about short story anthologies is that even the lousy entries are short enough they aren't generally unpleasant enough to spoil the pudding.

[KorvinStarmast]

I tried so hard to enjoy Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight but I just can't.
Off to second hand books it goes.
I am back to nonfiction. Currently reading The New Map, Yergin.

[Ionathus]

I just chewed through Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. Two of the most unique, delightful, and evocative books I've ever read. Must-reads for anybody who likes fantasy. Truly exquisite sensory descriptions. Exactly the right tone of sass mixed with seriousness.

Both of them start off a little slow, but it doesn't make them boring -- just digestible. And as a result, the climax of each novel feels like a massive payoff. Both times, I read through the first half at a decent clip, but devoured the second half.

[IthilanorStPete]

I just chewed through Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. Two of the most unique, delightful, and evocative books I've ever read. Must-reads for anybody who likes fantasy. Truly exquisite sensory descriptions. Exactly the right tone of sass mixed with seriousness.

Both of them start off a little slow, but it doesn't make them boring -- just digestible. And as a result, the climax of each novel feels like a massive payoff. Both times, I read through the first half at a decent clip, but devoured the second half.

It's funny you bring those books up today. I read them, loved them, I've been participating in the fandom on Reddit a bit. I've read the first two chapters of Nona the Ninth that've been previewed on Tor.com (https://www.tor.com/2022/03/29/excerpts-nona-the-ninth-by-tamsyn-muir/) and Gizmodo/io9 (https://gizmodo.com/nona-the-ninth-excerpt-tamsyn-muir-locked-tomb-1848879544).

...and just today, Amazon made a preview available, including a very interesting prologue. Their page for the book is here (https://www.amazon.com/Nona-Ninth-Locked-Tomb-Book-ebook/dp/B09G14BQMM), click on the cover to see the preview.

[theangelJean]

I just read Wylah - the Koorie Warrior book 1: Guardians by Jordan Gould and Richard Pritchard. It was quite good for a fantasy book for kids.

The premise: Wylah is an aspiring art teacher 40 000 years ago (in what is now known as south western Victoria in Australia), when megafauna roamed and animals spoke directly with humans. Disaster strikes her village, and she must take up the totem of the Koorie Warrior to rescue her mob.

It's a good introduction for kids to Australian First Nations culture, with sprinklings of Peek Whurrong, the language of the Gunditjmara/Maar Nation, painting a picture of an established culture of many tribes. Followed the usual "hero gathers her allies and learns her strengths" structure that you get in many fantasy stories, in such a straightforward way that it was kind of visible to me as an adult how this had been imposed on the narrative. But the characters were well delineated with clear voices and decent amounts of fun. I actually bought this for my 8yo a few weeks ago, and yesterday she finally got to reading it. Afterwards she brought it to me and asked me to read it, and then spent some time with me, reading long passages out loud to me as I went along. She usually hates reading out loud and has to be coaxed, so something about the text seems to have appealed to her.

I am also enjoying The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers, which I first read as soon as I could get my hands on it in February and re-read whenever I want comforting science fiction. It's the final book in her Wayfarer series, set in a universe where humans are relative newcomers to the Galactic Commons; this final book actually has no humans among its main characters, although we do meet one late in the story. Instead we have three travellers of different species stopping at the Five-Hop One-Stop on Gorr, when a planet-wide disaster interrupts their journeys.

There are too many ways to say why and how much I love this series. It's basically wish-fulfillment for those of us who want to have respectful discussions about interpersonal and cultural issues. In the Galaxy where we meet the crew of the Wayfarer in the first book, there may still be wars over territory, there may still be minorities treated unequally for whom society pays only lip service to their rights. But the characters of these books are mostly mature adults who know how to behave around people of different cultures and species, even if they don't fully understand one another. This default to respectful interaction certainly doesn't solve anything by itself, but it does make it easier for the characters to listen to each other and engage with these issues. And while each novel may not be a grand adventure or a huge drama, the characters each find something changed and something to change themselves.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

My love of urban fantasy is well documented, and I've found a new werewolf series to read, the Kitty Norville books. I give them a solid 4 stars so far; entertaining reads, fast paced and pretty light reading, but they don't have that certain something that pushes them into being favorites. Maybe it's humor; most of the other urban fantasy I read goes out of its way to have funny moments and lines mixed in with the drama and fantasy.

The books focus a lot on the political and legal implications of people in the modern day starting to realize that things that go bump in the night are very much real. The main character is unintentionally right on the edge of that, running a talk show that blows up as a place for supernatural creatures and people associated with them to talk about their problems and be heard by someone that won't assume they're crazy.

First book is Kitty and the Midnight Hour.

[warty goblin]

Been reading the Elric books in vacation. Sometimes you read a fifty-is year old book, and it feels pretty modern. This is not one of those times. The distant and terse prose, the frequent characterization through what can only be described as telling, not showing, and the feel of the books are definitely not modern.

This is by no means a complaint, I honestly love this sort of arch descriptive language,
and for stories with themes as cosmic and weird as this it works fantastically. There's a sense of the world as both incredibly vivid and also unfixed and malleable at the edges. Overall I'm having a real blast with these, and will need to track down the rest of them when I return from foreign lands.

[LibraryOgre]

Haven't been going hard at it, but In the Court of the Nameless Queen (https://amzn.to/3RHefsq), which is transgender lesbian monster- ****er erotica; the main character is the Chief Consort (after the first story) to the Nameless Queen, an incarnate goddess shaped like a drider who, at the end of the first story, has placed a number of eggs in her transwoman consort. By the second story, the consort has given birth to 236 spiders, now about the size of horses. I haven't gotten around to the second story... like the Nameless Queen, one has to take it in small doses.

It's by the same author who did The Last Girl Scout (https://amzn.to/3JdAGlz), which is communist trans lesbians fighting vampires and fascists in a post-apocalyptic America. It is as wild as it sounds.

[Mystic Muse]

About to re-read Cursed World: Initial Sparks (https://www.amazon.com/Initial-Sparks-Cursed-World-McHugh/dp/1710730005/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?crid=MG9VM68GSO6E&keywords=cursed+world+initial+sparks&qid=1658523219&sprefix=cursed+world+initial+sparks%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-2)when I get some extra time.

Just going to post the author's summary


In a small town far to the north, a young girl wakes up for what will be the start of the most important week of her life. Join our heroine Rei Scios as she deals with transfer students, romance, ruffians, and the encroaching realization that the supernatural is probably very, very real. Adventure awaits as Rei's small town life is slowly turned on its end. Will she find love? Will her birthday go off without a hitch? Will she and her friends survive? There's only one way to know for sure...

Has a neat magic system, and characters' actions have very real consequences that don't get walked back.

[Velaryon]

I've been enjoying the audiobook of Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko, the sequel to Raybearer. I think I can honestly say these are the best YA fantasy I have read since Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy. I dig the African-inspired world, and unlike Children of Blood and Bone (which similarly draws influence from west African mythology), it doesn't feel like the same old story I've read 100 times before, just with a new coat of paint. Also, the dialogue is about 50 times better.

While it's not completely devoid of standard YA fantasy tropes, Raybearer forgoes the dreaded love triangle (in fact shutting it down so conclusively that even shippers can't resurrect it), and what tropes it does use it handles skillfully rather than making a cookie-cutter teen fantasy. There's also a lot of good political-social themes that I like, but I didn't see them as direct analogues for any real-world issues, and more importantly I never felt beaten over the head with them. I think it's entirely possible to miss or ignore that layer entirely and still enjoy this quite a bit.

Tarisai is a great protagonist, and while I'm still fairly early in book 2, so far it seems to be a worthy sequel to my favorite book of 2020 (even over the two Dresden books we got that year).

[warty goblin]

Reread time now:

The Guns of August
You should read this book. It's a genuinely masterful telling of the first month of World War 1, focused on the British, French and German perspectives, and it is absolutely captivating. Seriously, this is one of the most suspenseful books I have ever read, and it remains so on rereading it. Many books benefit from not knowing what happens next, I think it takes a rare mastery to deliver a book that becomes more poignant and involving when you know exactly what inevitably happens next, but remain impaled on all the moments where it could have gone differently.

Time of the Twins
Yep, it's Dragonlance time again. The new book apparently takes place just after Legends, which I have not read in many years now. Seems to be holding up pretty well, all things considered. Weis & Hickman do pretty 2D characters, but they're strongly drawn, and they're clearly having just a great time telling the story. Which is good, because I'm having a great time reading it.

[IthilanorStPete]

Reread time now:

The Guns of August
You should read this book. It's a genuinely masterful telling of the first month of World War 1, focused on the British, French and German perspectives, and it is absolutely captivating. Seriously, this is one of the most suspenseful books I have ever read, and it remains so on rereading it. Many books benefit from not knowing what happens next, I think it takes a rare mastery to deliver a book that becomes more poignant and involving when you know exactly what inevitably happens next, but remain impaled on all the moments where it could have gone differently.

It's a very good book, although the focus on the Western Front somewhat limits it as a work of history, IMO. I've recently been rereading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, on the factors that lead up to WW1 in the previous couple of decades; it's a fascinating insight into how basically all the countries involved had multiple factions advocating and setting different policies, the complexity of the interactions of different foreign policies, and the various contingent factors that could have lead to very different outcomes in 1914.

[Ionathus]

I've been on a reading kick recently!

I recently lost a bet and had to read a romance/crime paperback from the 90s as a result. It was unbelievably dull - not even entertaining in its badness, merely bad in its badness. The whole thing felt like the author had sleepwalked her way through writing it...but without any of the interesting hallucinations, sadly.

Even more recently, I had the pleasure of reading Rise of Kyoshi, a novel (not a graphic novel, just a straight-up book) set in the Avatar universe and covering Avatar Kyoshi's formative years. It was fantastic! In particular I loved the characters, the setting, the light political intrigue, the dialogue, and the worldbuilding. The writing was crisp and the descriptions of the bending fights were more evocative than I was expecting.

That last part is really important to me: I had worried that a prose medium would be unable to capture the show's fluid visuals and martial arts movement, but it was still a ton of fun to read the action scenes and imagine them in my mind's eye. It honestly did a better job at the action scenes than the Avatar graphic novel I read (The Promise - I'm interested in trying the others too).

On the whole, I would highly recommend it to any fans of the Avatar universe! While the storytelling wasn't quite as magical as the original series, I would place it at or above my experience watching Legend of Korra. Looking forward to the second book in the series!

(Nota bene: The book's violence is not family friendly like the shows'. There are several extremely violent deaths and the book explores an overall much grimmer tone than either cartoon does. It's not bleak or grimdark, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone under 13.)

[warty goblin]

Continuing the Dragonlance Legends reread, now about halfway through War of the Twins. These remain a lot of fun for me, and I think better than I would have credited them for based on memory alone. Structurally the series is substantially more complex than I recalled, with good use of flashbacks and dramatic revelations.

It also makes good use of having multiple characters, and cuts between them regularly, often between paragraphs rather than chapters. This lets the narrative show things from the most interesting point of view, and integrates the characters' actions and thoughts into the action, rather than in a flashback later on. I miss books doing this, it lets the character development and action flow much more smoothly than the current vogue of max 1 PoV per chapter. That can work, don't get me wrong, but it isn't the only good solution.

[Eldan]

So, in my quest to read more from famous authors of bygone decades that I haven't read yet, I picked up Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, because the name kept showing up on lists of best SciFi authors and I haven't read anything by him.

It's... weird. And not necessarily in a good way. The plot summary, the few chapters in that I am, is Unreliable Narrator confusedly wanders through city where weird things happen/have happened. Which should be something I'm all over, I love that kind of stuff, but it's also really, really slow. And I usually don't hate slow, but this book lacks a good hook to pull me in. The weird stuff that is happening is not that interesting, the unreliable narrator doesn't seem that unreliable, the conversations that people are having are incredibly mundane for what seems to be a city in the middle of a localized apocalypse in the middle of the US.

It's a slow read. I manage a chapter or so a night, before I have enough. I'll struggle on for a few more, but if nothing interesting happens, this is probably a pass.

[IthilanorStPete]

So, in my quest to read more from famous authors of bygone decades that I haven't read yet, I picked up Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, because the name kept showing up on lists of best SciFi authors and I haven't read anything by him.

It's... weird. And not necessarily in a good way. The plot summary, the few chapters in that I am, is Unreliable Narrator confusedly wanders through city where weird things happen/have happened. Which should be something I'm all over, I love that kind of stuff, but it's also really, really slow. And I usually don't hate slow, but this book lacks a good hook to pull me in. The weird stuff that is happening is not that interesting, the unreliable narrator doesn't seem that unreliable, the conversations that people are having are incredibly mundane for what seems to be a city in the middle of a localized apocalypse in the middle of the US.

It's a slow read. I manage a chapter or so a night, before I have enough. I'll struggle on for a few more, but if nothing interesting happens, this is probably a pass.

I haven't read any Delany either (though I'd like to), but Dhalgren's got a reputation for being especially weird. IIRC Babel-17's a bit easier to get started with, though I'd look around for other opinions, don't take that as gospel. :smalltongue:

[Eldan]

My problem is it's not weird enough and also no one in the story seems to care. "Oh, radio doesn't work, streets shift around, we're cut off, there's eternal fires burning and magic holograms. Anyway, how about some tedious small talk and/or sex?"

[james77]

I'm currently reading The Shining by Stephen King

[Mx.Silver]

Been a while since I've read Dhalgren, but yeah it's not the most accessible book out there - even before you get to the later parts where it starts running two different sequences of events with the same characters side-by-side on the same pages.
wrt how its characters are unconcerend about the wierdness that's part of The Point™, iirc, but if you haven't found it's 'clicked' with you yet I don't think it's going to get better as it goes along.


Speaking of not the most accessible books out there, I'm currently embarking on a re-read Lazlo Krasznahorkai's War and War, which should be a fun time1.

1for very specific definitons of "fun"

[Lvl45DM!]

I just finished the City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. Its one of the most fun urban fantasy books I've read, also, a very literal interpretation of the genre. There was a moment where the writing all came to this moment that should have been so obvious, that was so perfectly blended into the lore and characters and plot I put down the book and regretted not being the one to write it because it was perfect.

[Anteros]

Been making my way through the Cradle series. It's a cultivation story except with a western twist...which is to say there's no harems and the protagonist isn't a sociopath. It's a bit young adulty, but overall enjoyable.

[warty goblin]

Finished Test of the Twins in a 120 page binge read on Saturday. I'm pleased to say it still absolutely works for me, and gave me that nice melancholy feeling you get at the end of a good book. The climax, where Raistlin finally understands how shriveled his ambitions have left him and will leave the world is just a perfect piece of fantasy writing to me, the way the personal revelation is written large across the cosmos.

Now I find the personal revelation saves the day plot can fail terribly. Particularly when the personal revelation is actually I've been right the whole time and now I will fix everything with the power of feelz. This avoids that, because the revelation is Raistlin finally understanding his own hollowness, and what that has, and will, cost everyone else. Thus his final choice really means something, because it represents a drastic change from his overriding ambition to the decent person that lurked inside him, and the books always highlighted on the rare occasions it surfaced.

Now on to the new DL, Dragons of Deceit , which I have finally obtained. I didn't get very far yesterday, on account of general exhaustion, but the first 30 odd pages are great. It opens, as is only proper for a W&H novel, with a present tense info-dump about the location and history of a castle. If DL is your jam, it feels like coming home.

[Melayl]

Been making my way through the Cradle series. It's a cultivation story except with a western twist...which is to say there's no harems and the protagonist isn't a sociopath. It's a bit young adulty, but overall enjoyable.

An excellent series, and my favorite of Will's writings. I wouldn't call them young adult, though. Just more... upbeat? Positive? Happy? than many I have read in the genre.

[warty goblin]

Finished Dragons of Deceit . I was not expecting to be surprised at how the setup paid off, but I was definitely surprised at where (or more accurately when) it went. Gotta give props for W&H swinging for the fences on this one; I can't say whether it works or not until the next book comes out.

Next up, I need to finish up the Libromancer series by Jim Hines. Two books to go, should be pretty quick. The first book was fun, the second got serious, and I suspect the third will continue in that vein. I think I prefer the series in clever adventure story mode, the central conceit if being able to pull items out of books is excellent fodder for all sorts of creative mayhem and problem solving.

Also I've got a whole parcel of books on gem setting and lost wax casting coming this week. I've got some projects in mind that require a bit of research into skills I don't have. Yet.

[Wookieetank]

Recently finshed Blue Remmebered Earth and Poseidon's Wake by Alastair Reynolds (previously read the middle book On the Steel Breeze some years ago before I knew it was a trilogy). A delightful Space Opera that does a great job of creating scale and wonder, and while not everything is wrapped up at the end of things, there's enough closure to be satisfying. Has everything from mer-people to ancient precursors and AI running amuck, and Elephants (lots and lots of Elephants). Blue Remembered Earth is a little slower, but there's a Lot of world building going on in it, that the other two build on, and by Poseidon's Wake things are just flying by. Definitely worth a look if you like space opera, or any of Alastair Reynolds other works.

Now working on 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill (King), a collection of short stories. Only a couple of stories in so far, but already impressed with how much he's able to get into a short story.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Somebody mentioned Anno Dracula was good a while back, with the result that I’m currently a little more than a fifth of the way through it. So far, enjoying all the cameos, though I suspect a number are going over my head.

[Ionathus]

Nona the Ninth comes out in less than a week and I am losing my mind with anticipation. My partner's re-read Gideon and Harrow 4 times each.

[Eldan]

Recently finshed Blue Remmebered Earth and Poseidon's Wake by Alastair Reynolds (previously read the middle book On the Steel Breeze some years ago before I knew it was a trilogy). A delightful Space Opera that does a great job of creating scale and wonder, and while not everything is wrapped up at the end of things, there's enough closure to be satisfying. Has everything from mer-people to ancient precursors and AI running amuck, and Elephants (lots and lots of Elephants). Blue Remembered Earth is a little slower, but there's a Lot of world building going on in it, that the other two build on, and by Poseidon's Wake things are just flying by. Definitely worth a look if you like space opera, or any of Alastair Reynolds other works.

Now working on 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill (King), a collection of short stories. Only a couple of stories in so far, but already impressed with how much he's able to get into a short story.

Maybe I should give Poseidon's Wake a look then. I remember liking the worldbuilding in Blue Remembered Earth, but then sort of losing interest with the slow pace at some point in Steel Breeze and never picking up the third part.

[IthilanorStPete]

Nona the Ninth comes out in less than a week and I am losing my mind with anticipation. My partner's re-read Gideon and Harrow 4 times each.

I'm now wondering if I should take the 13th off from work, it's going to be hard to focus once Nona comes out.

[Wookieetank]

Maybe I should give Poseidon's Wake a look then. I remember liking the worldbuilding in Blue Remembered Earth, but then sort of losing interest with the slow pace at some point in Steel Breeze and never picking up the third part.

Steel Breeze was definitely slow at points, and Poseidon's Wake takes 100 pages or so to get really running, but once it started really going it was hard to put down. Parts of Poseidon give a bit of a Larry Niven/Ringworld vibe, which I found to be rather neat. Would definitely consider reading the last handful of chapters of Steel Breeze if you haven't, just due to them setting up a fair number of things for Poseidon.

[KorvinStarmast]

It's a very good book, although the focus on the Western Front somewhat limits it as a work of history, IMO. I've recently been rereading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, on the factors that lead up to WW1 in the previous couple of decades; it's a fascinating insight into how basically all the countries involved had multiple factions advocating and setting different policies, the complexity of the interactions of different foreign policies, and the various contingent factors that could have lead to very different outcomes in 1914. The Eastern Front (Russian/German tensions that had been building over decades) was crucial to why the German plan was built the way that it was; it's worth its own book.

So, in my quest to read more from famous authors of bygone decades that I haven't read yet, I picked up Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, because the name kept showing up on lists of best SciFi authors and I haven't read anything by him. The 60's were an interesting time in speculative fiction. There's a lot of 'meta' stuff in Delany's writing. I'd suggest Tales from Neveryon or Nova rather than Dhalgren; but those have also got unconventional structures.

I haven't read any Delany either (though I'd like to), but Dhalgren's got a reputation for being especially weird. IIRC Babel-17's a bit easier to get started with, though I'd look around for other opinions, don't take that as gospel. :smalltongue: Hmm, maybe I can grab Babel-17 at the used book store.

One of my best reads recently was The Elusive Shift which is Jon Peterson's recent book about the early RPG hobby.
It's very good if you are an RPG hobbyist.
For me it was especially good since it covered a time in my life where I played a lot of RPGs without really knowing much about "the community" as it were.
He nicely covers how the various kinds of play styles began to be recognized (munchkins, for example, were identified in the late 1970's and early 80's, and that appellation was directly linked to the second wave of gamers showing up in the hobby after the war gamers and early adapters started it.
He also does a nice job of covering the non-Mid West nodes of RPG and Wargame communities. California, New York, and Boston are covered, and some of the Dallas area gamers as well.

The other point he makes is that Fantasy and SF had huge amounts of overlap at that time, particularly within that small, core group of people who initiated the RPG hobby.

[ecarden]

Just finished the Unnecessary Victory, the third book in Sarah Lin's Brightest Shadow series. I quite enjoyed it, though I think calling it progression fantasy is incorrect and it's more epic fantasy combined with cosmic horror. Prophecy as a storytelling trope has been used for a long time in a lot of ways, but she puts a very unique, almost disease-like spin on it, which works real well for me.

[LibraryOgre]

Picked up Soul Taken by Patricia Briggs from the library (digital copy). I've enjoyed her books for a number of years now, after bumming a copy of Iron Kissed from my ex-wife while body doubling while she changed fish tanks.

[Melayl]

Picked up Soul Taken by Patricia Briggs from the library (digital copy). I've enjoyed her books for a number of years now, after bumming a copy of Iron Kissed from my ex-wife while body doubling while she changed fish tanks.

Just finished that one last week. It was rather excellent. I'm kind of liking her Alpha and Omega offshoot series better, though.

[LibraryOgre]

Just finished that one last week. It was rather excellent. I'm kind of liking her Alpha and Omega offshoot series better, though.

I struggled with that one. Especially early in the series, Charles was WAY too Dream Boyfriend for me to stomach.

"Oh, he's a 200 year old half-Salish, half-Celtic brooding werewolf with special Indian magic, but he's also a stone-cold assassin who only melts for the heroine. He's a pilot, and expert horseman, hacker, and financial adviser."

Meanwhile, every other 200 year old werewolf is being restrained from licking themselves to death only by his father's immense psychic powers.

It got better but the first couple books were rough.

[Anteros]

An excellent series, and my favorite of Will's writings. I wouldn't call them young adult, though. Just more... upbeat? Positive? Happy? than many I have read in the genre.

Oh don't get me wrong, I like the series a lot. It has some problems but overall it's a good read.

[Melayl]

I struggled with that one. Especially early in the series, Charles was WAY too Dream Boyfriend for me to stomach.

"Oh, he's a 200 year old half-Salish, half-Celtic brooding werewolf with special Indian magic, but he's also a stone-cold assassin who only melts for the heroine. He's a pilot, and expert horseman, hacker, and financial adviser."

Meanwhile, every other 200 year old werewolf is being restrained from licking themselves to death only by his father's immense psychic powers.

It got better but the first couple books were rough.

Yeah, ok, I can't really dispute that description of Charles too much...

[Scarlet Knight]

I just finished Nemesis by Philip Roth. It was recommended to me because it related to an epidemic during WWII.

It was fun to read about the locations in the book (I was born in NJ) and Roth is excellent with scene description. I finished it unsure of what the moral of the story was.

And considering Roth's reputation, the sex scenes were...meh.

[LibraryOgre]

Yeah, ok, I can't really dispute that description of Charles too much...

Ooof, now we're dealing with Sherwood's identity (I've got the hints of who he is related to, but not who he fully is), and I'm a bit "whhhhyyyyyyy". I trust Patty enough to know that she'll get there (I'm at 40% read), but right now, it's whhhhyyyyyyy

[Sermil]

So, 25+ years ago, I read a trilogy named Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams. I remembered exactly nothing about it -- not even the main character's name -- except (a) it was reasonably good and (b) it had a really neat twist at the end.


The twist being that the main human characters spend most of the trilogy trying to follow a prophecy that, to defeat the Tolkien-elves-but-they-have-a-different-name invaders of their land, they must gather three powerful magic swords -- the "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" of the series title -- and take them to Green Angel Tower. When they get there, they discover that the prophecy was how the elves could defeat the human invaders who had invaded and stolen their land centuries earlier. In other words, they completely misread the prophecy and did a bunch of work to give the bad guy the tools he needed to defeat them.


Anyways, I noticed it on the shelf the other day and thought "oh, I remember that being good, I should re-read it".

Boy was I wrong.

The beginning, the first half of the first book, isn't bad. We're introduced to Simon, the main character, who's supposed to be a scullion at the High King's castle but is mostly a really lazy teenager. It's a little slow, but not bad. Now, though, I'm at the start of the third book (To Green Angel Tower), and OMG I'm so sick of Simon. He's a complete Mary Sue. Everyone constantly talks about how great Simon is. Princes want to consult him and comfort him, magical beings owe him life debts, people make once-in-a-thousand-years exceptions to sacred rules to help him out of a jam. I kid you not, one of the other characters meets up with his fiancée, who he hasn't seen for half a year, and what do they talk about? How much they missed each other? All the things that happened since they were parted? How worried they are about their tribe which is right in the path of the oncoming bad guys? Nope! They talk about how great Simon is.

And he's really not great. At the beginning, he's lazy and impatient and thinks he'll get lots of glory if someone just gives him a chance -- OK, a bit of a trope, but fine, teenage boy. But we're now on the 3rd book, and when he's off adventuring he's complaining about how uncomfortable he is, and when he's not off adventuring, he complains that the prince won't send him off on more adventures and whines "Why wasn't I chosen for the dangerous mission?". He does a bunch of dumb and impulsive stuff, which either have no consequences or require someone else to rescue him, but no one ever really calls him on it, or when they do, they turn around and talk about how great he is a few pages later.

And all the POV characters have plot armor so thick it's amazing they can stand up. (The series has a bunch of POV characters who it switches between, similar to Wheel of Time but thankfully not quite as many POV characters as WoT had.) Tad Williams obviously wants to have lots of action scenes; especially in the first book, there's a fair number that don't really advance the plot but feel like "Hey, it's been 2 chapters since the last action scene, so some monsters appear!" And Simon is a scullion, so (understandably) he's not particularly good at fighting, but this leads to a lot of "and then Simon escapes by pure luck" stuff. Other, less-important characters push him out of the way at the last second (and die for their troubles) or the ancient bridge collapses just before the enemy can reach him, or whatever. There's one scene where a different POV character is being forced to duel to the death. There's a big buildup to the duel. We're told over and over that the other person in the duel is a better swordsman at the best of times, but worse, the POV character has just been beaten badly and can barely walk. There's no way, we're repeatedly assured, that POV character can survive the duel. The morning of the duel comes. And what does the POV character do? Does he finally abandon his honor and resort to devious tricks, realizing there are more important things than an honorable duel? Does he come up with some brilliant speech that convinces them to call off the duel? Does some long-ago Chekhov's gun finally return for some really cool payoff? Nope, nope, and nope. The other guy, the really great swordsman who has won multiple other duels, starts monologuing in the middle of the fight and lets the POV character trip him, and he lands on POV character's sword. The end. 🤦 The author wants the action scenes, wants the drama, wants you to think "Oh no! How will they get out of this one?" but doesn't know how to resolve the scenes.

Anyways, I'm maybe a third of a way through the third book, and struggling to finish. I really do want to finish, mostly because I want to see if my long-ago memory of the twist ending was right, but man is it hard going.

Mostly, I'm just embarrassed that I kept the books this long. I've been through multiple moves since I first bought them, and each time, when getting rid of stuff, I've packed those books based on my vague "oh ya, those were pretty good" memory. I should have dumped them and saved myself the weight decades ago.

[Mechalich]

Nope, nope, and nope. The other guy, the really great swordsman who has won multiple other duels, starts monologuing in the middle of the fight and lets the POV character trip him, and he lands on POV character's sword. The end. 🤦 The author wants the action scenes, wants the drama, wants you to think "Oh no! How will they get out of this one?" but doesn't know how to resolve the scenes.


If I recall correctly that was more or less exactly where I dropped Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn when I first tried to read them back in college.

More generally, resolution seems to be the big problem with Tad Williams as a writer overall. He is a man with ideas, and some of those ideas - like Otherland or the Bobby Dollar series - are actually really intriguing, but he doesn't really have a good idea of how to turn those ideas into functional stories with a beginning, middle, and end. I think it's a case of the reach of his world-building vastly exceeding the grasp of his storytelling (I am not unsympathetic to this, I gone down this rode myself more than once). Of all his stuff I've been exposed to I actually like the Bobby Dollar books the best, because Williams manages to figure out somewhere along the way that he can just drop the greater implications of well, everything, and focus the story on Bobby's quest to save the succubus chick he fell in love with. Cliché as that might be, it's at least manageable.

[Ionathus]

I read Ready Player One 8ish years ago, didn't hate it, but had a family member who loved it so I wound up with a copy of Ready Player Two. I recently picked it up just to clear it off my backlog, and couldn't get more than 10 pages before throwing it in the Goodwill bin. I think it was right around the moment where the main character acts smug for knowing that the number 42 is a super clever obscure reference to this little book nobody else knows about, gosh aren't I so terribly smart for knowing pop culture and I had to be done.

[Wookieetank]

I read Ready Player One 8ish years ago, didn't hate it, but had a family member who loved it so I wound up with a copy of Ready Player Two. I recently picked it up just to clear it off my backlog, and couldn't get more than 10 pages before throwing it in the Goodwill bin. I think it was right around the moment where the main character acts smug for knowing that the number 42 is a super clever obscure reference to this little book nobody else knows about, gosh aren't I so terribly smart for knowing pop culture and I had to be done.

:smallconfused:
Per Wikipedia:
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has become an international multi-media phenomenon; the novels are the most widely distributed, having been translated into more than 30 languages by 2005."

So yeah terribly obscure book.

Was considering looking at the Ready Player books, but not with that sort of nonsense.

[Eldan]

Yeah, don't, especially if that annoys you. It's all along the lines of "quote a line from Monty Python to unlock world saving mode" and fifty characters going "What is a Monty Python?"

The entire book is about the main character basically solving the world because he's the only one who knows super obvious pop culture trivia. BEing a better nerd than other people and saying "Um Actually" more often makes you a billionaire who also gets the hot girl and owns the worlds largest megacorp. But still a good person.

[Ionathus]

To Elaborate on Eldan's example: there is a part in the climax of Ready Player One where, in order to win the race and (effectively) save the world from the corporation trying to control it...

The main character is dropped into a virtual recreation of cult 80s films and must recite the dialogue, word for word (https://readyplayerone.fandom.com/wiki/Flicksync).
This is portrayed as a good, cool thing to do.

https://xkcd.com/16/

[GloatingSwine]

Was considering looking at the Ready Player books, but not with that sort of nonsense.

That's basically the sine qua non of the books' approach to culture.

You know all that gatekeepy fan bull**** where how much trivial crap you can remember about things proves how much of a fan of them you are and if you don't remember all the trivial crap you're not a "real fan".

That's those books. They exist to validate that approach to fandom.

Like you'll be waiting for the twist where the protagonist is actually a complete hack ****weasel and the story finally makes him realise it, but it never comes because he's supposed to be a cool guy despite actually being a pretty ****ty person. (See: H)

[Anteros]

I mean, those books are pretty transparent in what they're offering. If they're not for you just don't read them. It's like reading Romeo and Juliet and then complaining because you dislike Shakespeare. I don't like reference based media either, so I just don't consume those.

It's a fair complaint for a lot of media, but Ready Player One pretty much tells you it's gonna just be a bunch of references right from the jump.

[Ionathus]

I mean, those books are pretty transparent in what they're offering. If they're not for you just don't read them. It's like reading Romeo and Juliet and then complaining because you dislike Shakespeare. I don't like reference based media either, so I just don't consume those.

It's a fair complaint for a lot of media, but Ready Player One pretty much tells you it's gonna just be a bunch of references right from the jump.

I don't hate nostalgia bait. Some of it (e.g. Breath of the Wild, sans final boss) is quite good. RPO was not good. It doesn't deserve any grace for hiding behind its "genre", if you can call it that - and I wouldn't.

IMO, if a piece of media wants to significantly involve other, more popular media in its story, there should be a reason for that. It should *do* something with the reference. Make a new connection, find a parallel to your new story, or deepen the story, or transform it in some way. Otherwise you're just wallowing in stuff that other people made.

And that's assuming that the writing is even good. Ernest Cline's writing ain't good. His characters were flat and the plot was straightforward, unimaginative wish fulfillment. There's a whole chapter/section where the main character (who is unhealthy and overweight at the start of the book) decides he should get into better shape, because it's always made things tough for him. And then he just...does. Basically overnight. No struggle, or introspection, or emotional reaction. Just a to-do list of "and then I bought exercise gear" "and then I exercised" "and then I was skinny and strong and attractive." Just a series of logistical steps. Which could have even worked ironically, if he'd taken a moment to go "wow, that was actually really easy" or "I'm scared by how easy this was" or even, gosh, I dunno, "wow, getting in shape is a lot easier now that I can afford this fancy VR rig that lets me get exercise while playing the OASIS. It's almost like rich people have more time and resources to take care of themselves." Anything. Any crumb of self-awareness or insight on the process. But instead, it just...happened. It was like a robot or a 10-year old wrote the prose.
----
Astute readers may notice I said I "didn't hate" RPO in my first post on this topic. And that's true...at the time :P But every time I interact with it, I notice another new thing that irks me. Including this time, because BOY HOWDY does GloatingSwine's point about gatekeeping bother me in hindsight. The whole book is a gatekeeper's manifesto. Knowing obscure trivia about random crap that a single dude arbitrarily picked is literally the only qualifier to rule the world. Gah, yuck. I think I need to go have a lie down.

[Eldan]

I mean, those books are pretty transparent in what they're offering. If they're not for you just don't read them. It's like reading Romeo and Juliet and then complaining because you dislike Shakespeare. I don't like reference based media either, so I just don't consume those.

It's a fair complaint for a lot of media, but Ready Player One pretty much tells you it's gonna just be a bunch of references right from the jump.

Oh, I absolutely enjoyed part of them. But they are super transparent in their pandering. It's just pandering that panders to me. Or perhaps me as a 15 year old, but it still works.

[GloatingSwine]

I mean, those books are pretty transparent in what they're offering. If they're not for you just don't read them. It's like reading Romeo and Juliet and then complaining because you dislike Shakespeare. I don't like reference based media either, so I just don't consume those.

It's a fair complaint for a lot of media, but Ready Player One pretty much tells you it's gonna just be a bunch of references right from the jump.

RPO isn't even references. It's just lists!

[BisectedBrioche]

I just finished reading A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh.

It's a fascinating analysis of the way thieves interact with (and more importantly, misuse) the spaces everyone uses, as well as how law enforcement tries to play catch-up.

It starts with a quick definition of burglary (as a legal term, it's pretty wild, and gets its own chapter), goes on to explain how thieves look for and exploit weaknesses in building, looks at the means (turns out actual thieves rarely use lockpicks), inside jobs, and finally wraps up with getaways (which is effectively the same concepts, applied to the entire city a building's located in).

There's a final chapter on the cultural role of burglars and thieves.

Definitely read it if you like stealth games, or just enjoy rolling rogues. =3

[Wookieetank]

Re: RPO
Yeah that sounds like a whole bunch of not my cup of tea. Might pick up a Discworld novel for my obscure reading preferences instead. :smallwink:

Made it through more of 20th Century Ghosts, think I'm gonna have to watch The Black Phone. I'm intrigued to see how well they take a rather straightforward short story and make it into a film. Still not a huge fan of Kafka, even in reference/homage (specifically The Metamorphosis). I get the whole social commentary of it, but just the feel of the style is very...off for me. Which is probably part of the point, but doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.

[theangelJean]

I just read two very different books: Painting Culture by Fred R. Myers and Talking to my Country by Stan Grant. (Apparently I'm on a social justice kick at the moment.) The first one was academic, dry and actually immensely informative. I feel like it would have made a great documentary film, if only we had the footage. The second was ... Worthwhile.

Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art is about the history of how acrylic "dot" paintings by a particular group of artists in Central Australia came to be sought after, sourced, hung in prestigious galleries around the world and subsequently valued at high prices. (I certainly had not expected that it happened in that order.) It's written by an American anthropologist who was part of the community for a short while, in theory to study the culture of the artists themselves - to the point where at the time, he did not take pictures of the art they were making, and described it only through rudimentary sketches. There are great insights into how the artists viewed the process of painting, how the sale of the paintings was expected to support the community, how the culture being painted was adapted to artificial materials and presentation, their relationship with the individuals whose job it was to promote and sell their work on a government budget, how the sellers worked to change the classification from "anthropological artefact" to "modern art", and the formation of the organisations backing these individuals, in the context of the history of Australia. It was fascinating and very well referenced with many personal accounts, but it would need to be significantly dumbed down to reach "readable". I slogged through it and didn't finish it in the nine weeks I had it out from the library, and felt like I'd learned a lot all the same.

Talking to my Country was extremely readable - you'd hope so, given the writer is a veteran journalist. The stories he tells of his family's history might be unknown to some, but personally I felt like I was just reading accounts of stories I already knew existed. Having made it to the end, it seems like the thesis was supposed to be "all Indigenous people share this history, and that is why [Indigenous public figure, not actually part of the book] responded to [events in 2015] by leaving the public sphere - he had just had enough". Which, while probably true, is not actually a logical conclusion of the book itself. But the individual stories were well told.

[Palanan]

I’ve just finished Lost World of the Golden King, which despite its Indiana Jones title is a rather difficult academic book. Not for the writing, which is quite smooth and readable, but because it’s telling a very different story than the one I was looking for.

The book is ostensibly about the history of Bactria, which was briefly the northeastern-most corner of Alexander’s empire, and which became a kingdom with all the trappings of Hellenistic culture centered in what is today northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan.

Unfortunately the book isn’t a straight narrative, nor even a discussion of the kingdom’s archaeology, nor even a discussion of the archaeology of coin finds. Instead it’s a detailed survey of the history of scholarship of coin finds and the changing views on how the Greco-Bactrian world was ruled, based on coin finds and the king lists which were rather imaginatively derived from them.

I learned a fair amount about numismatics, as well as other things we can’t discuss here, and there is some very interesting discussion of how ancient coins were struck; but the author’s insistence on giving us obscure details of Greco-Bactrian numismatic scholarship made for a slog in places, and the history of the scholarship tended to obscure the history of the kingdom itself, which is what I was really motivated for.

Two later chapters present, with much fanfare, the concept of a “cognitive map” of ancient minters and how that supposedly leads to insights on their perceptions of their world and culture; but despite the evident academic trendiness of this approach, those chapters ultimately had very little insight to offer. And the book’s conclusion was more of a truncated epilogue which also offered no great enlightenment.

The book did give me a lot of good ideas for some projects I’m working on, and anyone who’s interested in ancient coins might find it worthwhile. But for anyone looking for an introductory survey of the kingdom’s history, as I was, should keep looking, as I am.

[Mechalich]

I learned a fair amount about numismatics, as well as other things we can’t discuss here, and there is some very interesting discussion of how ancient coins were struck; but the author’s insistence on giving us obscure details of Greco-Bactrian numismatic scholarship made for a slog in places, and the history of the scholarship tended to obscure the history of the kingdom itself, which is what I was really motivated for.

Two later chapters present, with much fanfare, the concept of a “cognitive map” of ancient minters and how that supposedly leads to insights on their perceptions of their world and culture; but despite the evident academic trendiness of this approach, those chapters ultimately had very little insight to offer. And the book’s conclusion was more of a truncated epilogue which also offered no great enlightenment.

The book did give me a lot of good ideas for some projects I’m working on, and anyone who’s interested in ancient coins might find it worthwhile. But for anyone looking for an introductory survey of the kingdom’s history, as I was, should keep looking, as I am.

My understanding of the subject is that for Greco-Bactria and a number of similar states in nearby Central Asian territories (ex. the Kushans) the coins are essentially all the history we have. The archeological evidence is limited and there are functionally zero written records, and there are hardly any outside chronicles prior to XUanzang in the 7th century.

You might try Christoph Baumer's History of Central Asia (Vol 1), which is more focused on the archeological evidence and contains a spends a significant amount of its space covering Greco-Bactria.

[Ionathus]

Nona the Ninth comes out in less than a week and I am losing my mind with anticipation. My partner's re-read Gideon and Harrow 4 times each.

Finished Nona the Ninth. It was a trip and a half. Did you know cows exhibit mourning behavior?

The Locked Tomb series has been a rollercoaster so far. Gideon the Ninth was a mostly-straightforward romp of swords and sorcery with a sarcastic edge, and then Harrow the Ninth was totally different, like some sort of melancholic reflection domestic drama with occasional necromancy, and now Nona the Ninth was pretty much just a constant brainmelter.

Best book series I've read in...maybe ever.

[Melayl]

Ooof, now we're dealing with Sherwood's identity (I've got the hints of who he is related to, but not who he fully is), and I'm a bit "whhhhyyyyyyy". I trust Patty enough to know that she'll get there (I'm at 40% read), but right now, it's whhhhyyyyyyy

The payoff was worth the wait, I think.

I'm also interested to see what trouble Samuel has gotten himself into. It was a nice teaser.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Mechalich
You might try Christoph Baumer's History of Central Asia (Vol 1), which is more focused on the archeological evidence and contains a spends a significant amount of its space covering Greco-Bactria.

Thanks for the suggestion, this looks like a good synthesis and overview of Central Asia. Based on the TOC, he seems to spend maybe thirty pages on Bactria. Should be good for placing Bactria in a broader geographic context.

.

[LibraryOgre]

The payoff was worth the wait, I think.

I'm also interested to see what trouble Samuel has gotten himself into. It was a nice teaser.

I kinda feel like that got wrapped up a bit too neatly, TBH... might wind up with a shake-up in the pack, but the main worry seems to have gotten resolved without much effort from Mercedes, and almost entirely off-screen.

I was a little surprised that we got another Bonarata novel, but Silence Fallen was 4 books at 5 years ago.

[Mechalich]

Thanks for the suggestion, this looks like a good synthesis and overview of Central Asia. Based on the TOC, he seems to spend maybe thirty pages on Bactria. Should be good for placing Bactria in a broader geographic context.


It's pretty good. I'm currently working my way (slowly) through volume 2. The main weakness is a lack of good ancient world maps so its sometimes hard to tell where all these ancient cities that no longer exist were actually supposed to be, but you can supplement that. Also, Baumer's focus is on art history, so there's a lot about stylistic correspondences of various archeological finds and how changes in art trace things like the movement of religious and ethnic influences across the region over time, for example, how the Buddha might go from being drawn using an Indian style to a more Sogdian style to a Chinese style across the centuries in some place like Kashgar.

The books themselves are super-high quality with great photo prints, though they are also giant implements of blunt trauma as mighty coffee table hardcovers. Unfortunately, they are correspondingly expensive.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Mechalich
The main weakness is a lack of good ancient world maps so its sometimes hard to tell where all these ancient cities that no longer exist were actually supposed to be….

I value maps quite a bit, so this is a little disappointing. Presumably in this case the art photos help make up for it, but I really do like having my geographic bearings.


Originally Posted by Mechalich
Unfortunately, they are correspondingly expensive.

ILL to the rescue.

[KorvinStarmast]

Current fiction: Joseph Conrad, Nostromo. This may take a while, the style is quite verbose.

[Dragonus45]

Finished Nona the Ninth. It was a trip and a half. Did you know cows exhibit mourning behavior?

The Locked Tomb series has been a rollercoaster so far. Gideon the Ninth was a mostly-straightforward romp of swords and sorcery with a sarcastic edge, and then Harrow the Ninth was totally different, like some sort of melancholic reflection domestic drama with occasional necromancy, and now Nona the Ninth was pretty much just a constant brainmelter.

Best book series I've read in...maybe ever.

I blasted my way through that one on release day and had to go back again and pick over various scenes to try and put details together. I love how this series makes me feel so damn stupid. Have you seen how someone found a cypher from the names of the Jod chapters in Nona?

[Ionathus]

I blasted my way through that one on release day and had to go back again and pick over various scenes to try and put details together. I love how this series makes me feel so damn stupid. Have you seen how someone found a cypher from the names of the Jod chapters in Nona?

I did see that! I love how many hints, secrets, and callbacks Muir slips into her writing. The Locked Tomb might not have the most secrets and easter eggs of any series I've ever read, but it is the best of any series I've read at incorporating them smoothly and making the realization feel fitting and "earned." Nona the Ninth made me work for a lot of its exposition, even more so than Gideon or Harrow, and it really gave a sense of payoff to that dawning comprehension. So many books just lay it all out there without any work required on my part.

And then, of course, she caves and throws in a None Pizza With Left Beef joke for the lulz.

[Dragonus45]

I did see that! I love how many hints, secrets, and callbacks Muir slips into her writing. The Locked Tomb might not have the most secrets and easter eggs of any series I've ever read, but it is the best of any series I've read at incorporating them smoothly and making the realization feel fitting and "earned." Nona the Ninth made me work for a lot of its exposition, even more so than Gideon or Harrow, and it really gave a sense of payoff to that dawning comprehension. So many books just lay it all out there without any work required on my part.

And then, of course, she caves and throws in a None Pizza With Left Beef joke for the lulz.

Yea the meme references are where her Homestuck roots really shine through, well that and the hyper dense plot that constantly shifts it's narrative voice, structure, style, and genre while expecting you to take extensive notes. Nona has left me feeling a little put off though now that the ride is over. It's clear from the way the narrative kind of doesn't move that this was originally going to be the first third or so of the next book even if one isn't totally familiar with the publication history.

[LaZodiac]

So what's the like, appeal of the Locked Tomb series? Everything I've heard and experienced about it feels miserable, I'm genuinely curious what it's got going on.

[Dragonus45]

So what's the like, appeal of the Locked Tomb series? Everything I've heard and experienced about it feels miserable, I'm genuinely curious what it's got going on.

So this is a hard answer because each book is very very different from the others. With the first being a sort of murder mystery at necromancy school kind of deal but the protagonist is a sarcastic ******* who doesn't want to be there, but is also nursing a massive crush on the necromancer Princess of Pluto she is there to be the bodyguard of which complicated their deeply resentful relationship. The atmosphere of the story really pulls me in, and the excellent character work takes it from there to the finish line. And for people like me who really like this kind of things it gets just enough into the mechanics of how the necromantic magic they use works to feel like it isn't pulling anything out of it's but when that magic comes into play. But that's only the first book, which gains tons and tons of reread value after book 2 and 3 each! (I'll also say that I was put off for it forever because I tend not to like necromancy and also the only thing people would ever say about it was that it had swords and lesbians. Which made me think that that was all it had going for it, which was totally wrong and the people who boil it down to being only that really do a disservice.)

The second book is also great, and a bit hard to talk because it's told in second person to excellent effect and literally everything about it's premise is kind of a spoiler for the first book but is worth a read for getting to see the way it totally demystifies the "God Emperor" guy from the first book.

:EDIT: To be more specific to your question about it being miserable, while yes the story has a great deal of tragedy and hardship it also has a wicked sharp sense of humor and great emotional beats to help it feel like it is never too overwhelming.

[warty goblin]

So what's the like, appeal of the Locked Tomb series? Everything I've heard and experienced about it feels miserable, I'm genuinely curious what it's got going on.

I'm right there with you. I read the first book and found it kinda mediocre; not even miserable just dull, but with occasional references to porn mags because it's supposed to be all gonzo and challenging.

And now I'm wondering just what I missed.

[LaZodiac]

So this is a hard answer because each book is very very different from the others. With the first being a sort of murder mystery at necromancy school kind of deal but the protagonist is a sarcastic ******* who doesn't want to be there, but is also nursing a massive crush on the necromancer Princess of Pluto she is there to be the bodyguard of which complicated their deeply resentful relationship. The atmosphere of the story really pulls me in, and the excellent character work takes it from there to the finish line. And for people like me who really like this kind of things it gets just enough into the mechanics of how the necromantic magic they use works to feel like it isn't pulling anything out of it's but when that magic comes into play. But that's only the first book, which gains tons and tons of reread value after book 2 and 3 each! (I'll also say that I was put off for it forever because I tend not to like necromancy and also the only thing people would ever say about it was that it had swords and lesbians. Which made me think that that was all it had going for it, which was totally wrong and the people who boil it down to being only that really do a disservice.)

The second book is also great, and a bit hard to talk because it's told in second person to excellent effect and literally everything about it's premise is kind of a spoiler for the first book but is worth a read for getting to see the way it totally demystifies the "God Emperor" guy from the first book.

:EDIT: To be more specific to your question about it being miserable, while yes the story has a great deal of tragedy and hardship it also has a wicked sharp sense of humor and great emotional beats to help it feel like it is never too overwhelming.

I didn't mean miserable as in "too dark and gritty" I meant miserable in that "if I was stuck in a room with Gideon I'd try to leave through any means possible".

I've read the first fourish chapters cause that's what the Amazon preview lets me read and if the book continues along what it presented, I just don't understand what people see in it.


I'm right there with you. I read the first book and found it kinda mediocre; not even miserable just dull, but with occasional references to porn mags because it's supposed to be all gonzo and challenging.

And now I'm wondering just what I missed.

From what it sounds like, nothing.

[Ionathus]

So what's the like, appeal of the Locked Tomb series? Everything I've heard and experienced about it feels miserable, I'm genuinely curious what it's got going on.

"Lesbian necromancers in space" is the elevator pitch, but it's not the appeal, at least for me.

I also struggled to get into the first quarter of Gideon, particularly for the reasons cited by both you and warty goblin: Gideon was abrasive and annoying and everyone else was even nastier. However, without spoiling too much, the book opens up quickly after that - and the elements that you cited not liking in the first fourish chapters evolve into a very different (more enjoyable) vibe. By the end of the first book, I was genuinely hooked by several elements:


Complex and rewarding character relationships
Sharp and evocative sensory descriptions, and
A dense, chewy plot that reveals more every time I come back to it.

All three of them continue through the next two books, and they combine to create a very unique vibe I've never experienced in anything else I've read. This isn't just me gushing about a favorite author - I do truly believe these are the elements that make The Locked Tomb series stand out and make up its core "appeal." By the end of Gideon the Ninth, you'll definitely know whether or not the rest of the series is to your tastes. But I do believe it'll be worth your time to finish Gideon, at least.

[Mechalich]

"Lesbian necromancers in space" is the elevator pitch, but it's not the appeal, at least for me.

I also struggled to get into the first quarter of Gideon, particularly for the reasons cited by both you and warty goblin: Gideon was abrasive and annoying and everyone else was even nastier. However, without spoiling too much, the book opens up quickly after that - and the elements that you cited not liking in the first fourish chapters evolve into a very different (more enjoyable) vibe. By the end of the first book, I was genuinely hooked by several elements:


Complex and rewarding character relationships
Sharp and evocative sensory descriptions, and
A dense, chewy plot that reveals more every time I come back to it.

All three of them continue through the next two books, and they combine to create a very unique vibe I've never experienced in anything else I've read. This isn't just me gushing about a favorite author - I do truly believe these are the elements that make The Locked Tomb series stand out and make up its core "appeal." By the end of Gideon the Ninth, you'll definitely know whether or not the rest of the series is to your tastes. But I do believe it'll be worth your time to finish Gideon, at least.

See, I've read the first two books and I would claim that the characters are highly inconsistent at best, the descriptions are overly detailed and numbing, and the plot is utterly pointless because it completely fails to explain why this necromancer empire exists, what challenges it faces, and why anyone would care that it should continue to exist. Also, while Gideon the Ninth is straightforward enough and manages to eventually work its way to a decent climax with some cool necromancer fights in the end, Harrow the Ninth is an absolute travesty of a book centered around a completely out of character bait and switch that spends 3/4ths of its length spinning its wheels pointlessly.

Personally, I don't think I could warn people away from the series strongly enough. Gideon is okay, but Harrow is 'throw the book at the wall' infuriating.

[Ionathus]

Character and prose are down to personal preference, so I'm not going to debate you there. But I think if you're criticizing the 2nd book for not fixating on and explaining the logistics of the Empire when the scope is very clearly the exploration of a single person's psyche & trauma, that's not really a criticism -- it just wasn't the direction you wanted the story & worldbuilding to take.

[Mechalich]

Character and prose are down to personal preference, so I'm not going to debate you there. But I think if you're criticizing the 2nd book for not fixating on and explaining the logistics of the Empire when the scope is very clearly the exploration of a single person's psyche & trauma, that's not really a criticism -- it just wasn't the direction you wanted the story & worldbuilding to take.

No, it's absolutely a criticism, because I do not care about Harrow's psyche and trauma and nothing in book one or book two provides any reason why I should care or why it would matter. In fact, because book one mostly establishes that Harrow is a horrible person (though arguably through no fault of her own) the only reason to care would be if it mattered for some greater purpose and there's no indication that it does. There's also the problem that Harrow's trauma, and frankly the various other baggage attached to basically every character is incredibly alien. The necromancy-saturated society of the empire is so twisted away from any actual human social system that can exist in the real world that it puts these characters at an extraordinary distance from the reader.

[Ionathus]

No, it's absolutely a criticism, because I do not care about Harrow's psyche and trauma and nothing in book one or book two provides any reason why I should care or why it would matter. In fact, because book one mostly establishes that Harrow is a horrible person (though arguably through no fault of her own) the only reason to care would be if it mattered for some greater purpose and there's no indication that it does. There's also the problem that Harrow's trauma, and frankly the various other baggage attached to basically every character is incredibly alien. The necromancy-saturated society of the empire is so twisted away from any actual human social system that can exist in the real world that it puts these characters at an extraordinary distance from the reader.

Again, I don't feel like this is really a thing we can debate effectively, given all of your criticisms come down to personal taste. I definitely don't expect to change your mind - just share my own perspective and hope that others like LaZodiac (who asked about the series's appeal in the first place) will take it into consideration.

If you came out of book 1 thinking Harrow was a horrible person with not enough redeeming qualities to care about her as a character, I can understand...even if I feel very strongly otherwise. Any character that starts out so antagonistic is going to run that risk, and it just didn't click for you, and that's fine. You also get points for bravery for then picking up a sequel called Harrow the Ninth if you already knew you hated the title character. :smallbiggrin:

However, I disagree that "the only reason to care" is for the sake of your narrow definition of "some greater purpose." In fact, I found it quite easy to care. I'd grown attached to the characters of the first book, and processing the fallout from its ending throughout the second book was its own reward for me. That the 2nd book also sprinkled in abundant hints and allusions to the broader conflict throughout was the exact amount of worldbuilding I needed.

Ironically, Nona the Ninth contains far, far more worldbuilding and cultural details and Empire logistics and explanations about the threats it faces - by several orders of magnitude, in fact. Unfortunately, you'd probably hate it due to its narrative style and pacing. :smalltongue: Which is a pity, because
it barely contains any Harrow at all, and the title character is nearly Harrow's polar opposite personality-wise.

[Rodin]

I just read the first book based on this thread and my conclusion is similar to Mechalich's. Gideon's character fluctuates wildly throughout the book, and her quips feel like they're from a different book series that clashes horribly with the tone of the rest of the novel. Harrow isn't just antagonistic for most of the book - she's introduced as a full-fledged villain and Gideon's switch from "I hate you with two decades of very good reasons for hating you" to "Actually I love you and we're soulmates" gave me whiplash.

Which is a shame, because the actual murder/mystery portion of the book was quite good. Lots of twists and turns that kept me guessing but didn't feel like the author was cheating. I just think I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if the story was following Palamedes instead.

I don't have Mechalich's fortitude - I was considering reading the second book for the surrounding story, but Harrow is dislikeable enough that I made the decision not to buy on seeing her name on the cover.

[Ionathus]

Well, dang. I dunno if I've ever experienced such overwhelming negative reaction to a book series I loved. Maybe it's because online randos are less likely to share tastes...or maybe my in-person friends just aren't willing to actually be honest with me.

Regardless, I came here to rave about The Locked Tomb and evangelize for new readers, and the one-two-three-four punch of "read it already, didn't like it" has knocked the wind out of those sails. Thank you all for the discussion, I'll be back with another book later.

[Eldan]

Well, I just got the book based on the discussion here. It seems to cause strong reactions in people at least and since it's relatively short, I thought I'd give it a try.

[Rodin]

I feel bad about deflating your sails, my verdict is definitely more of a “Entertaining but flawed” for the first book. It’s more the thought that the second book isn’t going to follow the same format (Necromancer Danganronpa) and is going to switch protagonists to one I deeply disliked.

The first book I would still recommend if you’re a fan of mysteries. You just have to be able to deal with the Brandon Sanderson-esque main character and the book trying to sell you on a character I would have chucked off a cliff.

[warty goblin]

Well, dang. I dunno if I've ever experienced such overwhelming negative reaction to a book series I loved. Maybe it's because online randos are less likely to share tastes...or maybe my in-person friends just aren't willing to actually be honest with me.

Regardless, I came here to rave about The Locked Tomb and evangelize for new readers, and the one-two-three-four punch of "read it already, didn't like it" has knocked the wind out of those sails. Thank you all for the discussion, I'll be back with another book later.

By all means, please keep raving. I certainly didn't mean to puncture your sails, and I do not want to make people less interested in sharing their excitement about books due to the possible wave of negativity. The rest of the forum does that well enough already.



Finished Revisionary the last of the liberiomancy books by Jim Hines. This series started fun in the first book, got a bit darker in the second, had a real sophomore slump in the third, and then got both serious and angry in the fourth. This was a big improvement, book 3 was both serious and all about ridiculous magic, which is not a super engaging combination. The last book though really went for it. The series is urban fantasy, and book 3 ended with magic getting thoroughly kicked out of the closet. Book 4 is about the consequences of this, and they're very bad. Lots of abuse of power, that sort of thing, and the book is seriously angry about that. This keeps it from being a downer, and instead it manages to be a pretty tightly written sort of spy caper, but with magic. I don't think this series is going to blow you away, but it's enjoyable, pretty easy to read, and occasionally quite funny.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Eldan
Well, I just got the book based on the discussion here. It seems to cause strong reactions in people at least and since it's relatively short, I thought I'd give it a try.

I also tried it. I will decline to share my reaction.


Originally Posted by Rodin
You just have to be able to deal with the Brandon Sanderson-esque main character….

How is this bad?

_______


Meanwhile, as part of my quest to find the perfect book on historical pirates, I’m reading Under the Black Flag by Cordingly. So far it’s an enjoyable narrative, hoping for more analysis in later chapters.

This is an on-again, off-again quest of mine, which was revitalized by a recent re-watch of Black Sails. I found it less inspiring on the second viewing and didn’t finish, and now I’m motivated for historical pirates again.

It’s surprisingly hard to find a decent book on the topic—some of the more recent releases are rehashes of prior work, and others are a little too dense and dry even for me. But I persevere.

[Rodin]

How is this bad?


Sanderson has a sort of stock self-insert character that shows up in quite a bit of his work. They’re constantly quipping and have a witty response for everything, whether or not it’s appropriate for the situation. Sometimes it works quite well, like in the Reckoners series. Other times it makes the character irritating, like in the Skyward novels.

Gideon is like that, and fell on the wrong side of the line for me. I mention it because I’ve seen a lot of negative reactions to this type of character in the past on this forum.

[warty goblin]

Gideon's quippy responses didn't bother me, it was pretty obviously a front, and the narrative wasn't convinced they were the cleverest thing ever and proof of how awesome the character is. This tends to be what bugs me about quippy characters far more than the quips themselves.

Really I can't say I disliked Gideon, either the or the book. She's abrasive, but I've happily read books about far less pleasant people, and not been bothered. The book was fine, I couldn't find anything particularly wrong with it, though it felt sort of... mmm... fannish I guess? Like this was targeted at, and written in the context of, some specific fan culture to which I don't belong. Which didn't leave me feeling excluded so much as mildly baffled by what were supposed to be big dramatic moments or lovable character beats that, to me, kinda landed with a flop.

[Morgaln]

Sanderson has a sort of stock self-insert character that shows up in quite a bit of his work. They’re constantly quipping and have a witty response for everything, whether or not it’s appropriate for the situation. Sometimes it works quite well, like in the Reckoners series. Other times it makes the character irritating, like in the Skyward novels.

Gideon is like that, and fell on the wrong side of the line for me. I mention it because I’ve seen a lot of negative reactions to this type of character in the past on this forum.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Branderson doesn't really know how to write books for young adults. He seems to think that he needs to reduce complexity for those books and so he makes his characters less complex. That leads to rather one-dimensional protagonists in those books.
It's rather unfortunate, as his other books show he can do better, in YA novels he just doesn't. It's acerbated by the fact that his YA novels are invariably written from a single perspective, so if that one protagonist doesn't click (looking at you, insufferable know-it-all in The Rithmatist), you won't even have other viewpoints to look forward to.


On a different note, I've recently finished my long past due read-through of the Witcher books. I have to admit, they were not what I expected. I thought they would be mostly adventure stories and got a lot more politics, philosophy and metaphysics than I expected. Not that this is a complaint, mind you, they were pretty good books. It's just that in the later books, Geralt isn't central or even especially important to the plot. Which is weird for books named after him. Overall, the books feel like something of a mash between ASoIaF and the Drizz't Do'Urden books, but in a good way.

Now I'm moving on to Altered Carbon, of which I've heard that the books are better than the show (which had an interesting premise but was decidedly mediocre). I hope the book will do better at scratching that cyberpunk itch.

[Dragonus45]

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Branderson doesn't really know how to write books for young adults. He seems to think that he needs to reduce complexity for those books and so he makes his characters less complex. That leads to rather one-dimensional protagonists in those books.
It's rather unfortunate, as his other books show he can do better, in YA novels he just doesn't. It's acerbated by the fact that his YA novels are invariably written from a single perspective, so if that one protagonist doesn't click (looking at you, insufferable know-it-all in The Rithmatist), you won't even have other viewpoints to look forward to.

Yea his YA stuff feels way more hit or miss on the character front. The Alcatraz stuff had the benefit of a narrative framing where the character talking in past tense and really talking up what an awful person he considered himself to be because of some things he does in the future of the narrative kept things interesting. I also enjoyed Spensa from Skyward flight because a gung ho constantly agro fighter jock who **** talk like Conan the Barbarian on a sugar high just appeals to me. Getting the tie in stuff between book two and three from the perspectives of a bunch of other characters was also nice.



Now I'm moving on to Altered Carbon, of which I've heard that the books are better than the show (which had an interesting premise but was decidedly mediocre). I hope the book will do better at scratching that cyberpunk itch.

The first season and first book are about equally good, although still different. The second season is where the quality between the two really shows.

[Taevyr]

I tried my hand at Steelheart once, and while it had the same typical sanderson elements, it also felt... generally awkward, in a way? Like he was trying a tad too hard to make it young adult.

Love Sanderson otherwise, even if he tends to re-use certain character types or plot beats (arranged marriages for everyone!). He's fun, his magic systems are really interesting and the way he pushes them even more, and he's excellent for switching to when I don't feel like reading flowery prose for a while (a bit like Butcher's Dresden Files in that regard). And it's honestly amazing to take Elantris or the first Mistborn books, put them next to Stormlight, and see how much he's grown in making all his key characters into actual characters rather than plot devices with quirks (though there are of course exceptions, notably Kelsier). Elantris is a fun read, but Hrathen is about the only character that undergoes any real development through the story.


I've read most of the three Altered Carbon books: I dropped the third one 'cause some of the aspects I disliked about the first two were markedly worse there, and it was just... unpleasant to read for me. I'd certainly recommend the first two though. Haven't watched the series myself.

Right now, I'm in a bit of a lull: last book I read was Rhythm of War (which was just great, though I pity the many less-lore-addicted readers who had to go through several chapters of in-world magical theory and research development) and I essentially reached a point where, for the first time in a while, I can't go and get the most recent Dresden Files or Cosmere book, and have read most series I'd been wanting to read (and lost my list when my laptop went *bzzzt* last november). I could maybe give Glen Cook's Garret P.I. series a try, as I liked Black Company, but my heart's not really in it.

[Eldan]

Now I'm moving on to Altered Carbon, of which I've heard that the books are better than the show (which had an interesting premise but was decidedly mediocre). I hope the book will do better at scratching that cyberpunk itch.

I've only read the first one, which was decidedly better than the show. Better characters, better worldbuilding. I still thought it was pretty mediocre, though.

Specifically (safe spoiler, if you've seen the show and know the plot)
The plot is just kinda meh? It ends up as "rich guy commits murder to cover up his dealings with a hooker", with a few cyberpunk frills. That's the most tired noir detective plot possible.

[Dragonus45]

I've only read the first one, which was decidedly better than the show. Better characters, better worldbuilding. I still thought it was pretty mediocre, though.

Specifically (safe spoiler, if you've seen the show and know the plot)
The plot is just kinda meh? It ends up as "rich guy commits murder to cover up his dealings with a hooker", with a few cyberpunk frills. That's the most tired noir detective plot possible.

That's kind of what I liked about it. Technology may warp the world into something borderline unrecognizable people are still fundamentally the same.

[Anteros]

To me Sanderson is basically the modern Salvatore. He puts out a ton of pulpy mediocre fantasy at high volume. Which is fine for what it is. I like mediocre pulp fantasy as much as anyone sometimes. I do find the discussion about his young adult books amusing though as I couldn't tell the difference between them for the life of me. They're all the same. I just wish he'd quit writing Deus ex Machina endings. Even pulpy fantasy deserves a satisfying ending.

I may have actually insulted Salvatore a bit here. At least his characters are mostly distinguishable from one another. If you took a random line from Kelsier, Mat, Raoden, or Lightsong and asked me to figure out who's speaking without context clues...there's just no way.

[KorvinStarmast]

Current fiction: Joseph Conrad, Nostromo. This may take a while, the style is quite verbose. About a quarter of the way through, reading a chapter here and there as time permits. Lots of description, lots of flashbacks and character background/characterization to flesh out who the major players are, except, for the moment, the character for whom the story is named. He is mostly 'as seen through the eyes of others' except for an interesting scene during a public event where he has a public disagreement with his romantic partner.

Interesting approach, am looking forward to seeing the story develop, but this is not a quick read. Lots of description: I begin to understand the author's comments in forward in terms of how long it took him to write and finish the book.

[Dragonus45]

To me Sanderson is basically the modern Salvatore. He puts out a ton of pulpy mediocre fantasy at high volume. Which is fine for what it is. I like mediocre pulp fantasy as much as anyone sometimes. I do find the discussion about his young adult books amusing though as I couldn't tell the difference between them for the life of me. They're all the same. I just wish he'd quit writing Deus ex Machina endings. Even pulpy fantasy deserves a satisfying ending.

I may have actually insulted Salvatore a bit here. At least his characters are mostly distinguishable from one another. If you took a random line from Kelsier, Mat, Raoden, or Lightsong and asked me to figure out who's speaking without context clues...there's just no way.


The author's ability to resolve conflicts in a satisfying way with magic is directly proportional to how the reader understands said magic.

The hallmark of Sanderson's writing is that he explicitly never does Dues ex Machina. It's literally called Sanderson's law. Yea his character work before Stormlight and the Wax and Wayne series was much rougher then his world building his world building and the way his story climaxes tend to feel like puzzle snapping into place are literally hallmarks of his writing. And consistent enough people part way through only part two of the Mistborn stories have already accurately worked out how space travel is going to work for the setting with almost perfect accuracy. Even when his character work has been a bit rough though it still is leagues better then your implying here, the narrative voices of none of those characters could be confused for one another. They aren't even particularly similar characters?

[Taevyr]

To me Sanderson is basically the modern Salvatore. He puts out a ton of pulpy mediocre fantasy at high volume. Which is fine for what it is. I like mediocre pulp fantasy as much as anyone sometimes. I do find the discussion about his young adult books amusing though as I couldn't tell the difference between them for the life of me. They're all the same. I just wish he'd quit writing Deus ex Machina endings. Even pulpy fantasy deserves a satisfying ending.

I may have actually insulted Salvatore a bit here. At least his characters are mostly distinguishable from one another. If you took a random line from Kelsier, Mat, Raoden, or Lightsong and asked me to figure out who's speaking without context clues...there's just no way.

Yeah, Sanderson himself has remarked on how the "deus ex machina"-esque ending of the first Mistborn book is one of his biggest early writing mistakes, as there was no way not to see it as one with the information given at that point and thus makes for a rather lackluster ending. Beyond that one, which is explained without any retcons, only two books too late, I can't think of any ending that didn't fit perfectly within the magic system and lacked foreshadowing. And while I can see how you could take many of his earlier "witty" character dialogues and they wouldn't differ that much beyond setting flavour, as Dragonus said, there's a night and day difference in his character-building pre- and post his work on WoT. Hell, there's (luckily) a night-and-day difference in how he wrote certain WoT characters between the 12th and 14th book, particularly visible in Mat.


(Also, just some tongue-in-cheek critique I feel like giving: there're far better examples of characters being similar archetypes than the ones you chose. Kelsier, Raoden and Lightsong? Really? Raoden hardly has a personality beyond "the good prince™", and Kelsier is markedly one of his most nuanced early characters. Pick some of the "witty young noblewoman" archetypes that appear in about every longer series of his and you have a far better example, albeit still superficial)


That aside: For a quick example of Sanderson at his best, I'll always recommend The Emperor's Soul. It's short (by his standards, about 150 pages I think), but has his hallmarks of a tightly written plot and well-developed hard magic system, and the (very few) characters that appear more than once are quite well developed for a novel that size. It also manages to, for about 80-90%, take place in a single room without it getting tedious.

There's no denying that the man puts in effort to keep his work accessible to the general public and (relatively) easy to understand: I've seen his cosmere referred to as the "Marvel of Fantasy" more than a few times across the web, and while I can see where those people are coming from, it severely understates how mechanically tight his magic systems and worldbuilding are. And Stormlight in particular shows how much he's grown at writing nuanced, deeper characters.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Taevyr
For a quick example of Sanderson at his best, I'll always recommend The Emperor's Soul.

Interesting. I’ve read and deeply enjoyed most of Sanderson’s work, apart from the YA and later Stormlight books; but the Emperor’s Soul stands out for me as one that I very much disliked, to the point that it’s put me off any further Sanderson for a while.

[Taevyr]

Interesting. I’ve read and deeply enjoyed most of Sanderson’s work, apart from the YA and later Stormlight books; but the Emperor’s Soul stands out for me as one that I very much disliked, to the point that it’s put me off any further Sanderson for a while.

Now you got me curious what it was you disliked so much :smalltongue:. Considering you also dislike the later stormlight books, is it the larger focus given to the "pseudoscience"/mechanical principles of the magic systems? Because that was one of the things I loved about Rhythm of War, but I also couldn't help but think that it'd put many less lore-addicted people off.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Taevyr
Considering you also dislike the later stormlight books....

Not what I was trying to convey, but I see how my phrasing might have suggested that. I've only read the first Stormlight book, years ago, and simply haven't gotten to the others yet. And I haven't looked at his YA.

Emperor's Soul...just didn't grab me, and I found the protagonist offputting. It's been some years since I read it, so I don't recall much except the numb disappointment and a general notion to let Sanderson alone for a while.

[Anteros]

The hallmark of Sanderson's writing is that he explicitly never does Dues ex Machina. It's literally called Sanderson's law. Yea his character work before Stormlight and the Wax and Wayne series was much rougher then his world building his world building and the way his story climaxes tend to feel like puzzle snapping into place are literally hallmarks of his writing. And consistent enough people part way through only part two of the Mistborn stories have already accurately worked out how space travel is going to work for the setting with almost perfect accuracy. Even when his character work has been a bit rough though it still is leagues better then your implying here, the narrative voices of none of those characters could be confused for one another. They aren't even particularly similar characters?

Lol, ok. Mistborn literally ends with a character being gifted godlike power by the previous diety and using it to fix everything. What else would it have to do to qualify for you? Literally rename that character to Zeus? Elantris ends with the main character figuring out how to restore his race's godlike power by dragging a stick on the ground. Warbreaker literally ends with a character called the "God King" being healed and solving their problems.




Yeah, Sanderson himself has remarked on how the "deus ex machina"-esque ending of the first Mistborn book is one of his biggest early writing mistakes, as there was no way not to see it as one with the information given at that point and thus makes for a rather lackluster ending. Beyond that one, which is explained without any retcons, only two books too late, I can't think of any ending that didn't fit perfectly within the magic system and lacked foreshadowing. And while I can see how you could take many of his earlier "witty" character dialogues and they wouldn't differ that much beyond setting flavour, as Dragonus said, there's a night and day difference in his character-building pre- and post his work on WoT. Hell, there's (luckily) a night-and-day difference in how he wrote certain WoT characters between the 12th and 14th book, particularly visible in Mat.


(Also, just some tongue-in-cheek critique I feel like giving: there're far better examples of characters being similar archetypes than the ones you chose. Kelsier, Raoden and Lightsong? Really? Raoden hardly has a personality beyond "the good prince™", and Kelsier is markedly one of his most nuanced early characters. Pick some of the "witty young noblewoman" archetypes that appear in about every longer series of his and you have a far better example, albeit still superficial)


That aside: For a quick example of Sanderson at his best, I'll always recommend The Emperor's Soul. It's short (by his standards, about 150 pages I think), but has his hallmarks of a tightly written plot and well-developed hard magic system, and the (very few) characters that appear more than once are quite well developed for a novel that size. It also manages to, for about 80-90%, take place in a single room without it getting tedious.

There's no denying that the man puts in effort to keep his work accessible to the general public and (relatively) easy to understand: I've seen his cosmere referred to as the "Marvel of Fantasy" more than a few times across the web, and while I can see where those people are coming from, it severely understates how mechanically tight his magic systems and worldbuilding are. And Stormlight in particular shows how much he's grown at writing nuanced, deeper characters.

I used the examples I did because those are his books that I've read. After WoT I decided to stop subjecting myself to Sanderson. I've been told before that his writing matured recently, but it's a bit like someone telling you to stick your fingers into a blender with the promise it won't hurt as much as it used to. I haven't read all of his works, but after 8 of his novels that were all absolutely dreadful I feel like I gave him enough chances.

He does do great world building. I won't dispute that. It's just a shame that the stories he tells in those worlds are so bad.

[Dragonus45]

Lol, ok. Mistborn literally ends with a character being gifted godlike power by the previous diety and using it to fix everything. What else would it have to do to qualify for you? Literally rename that character to Zeus? Elantris ends with the main character figuring out how to restore his race's godlike power by dragging a stick on the ground. Warbreaker literally ends with a character called the "God King" being healed and solving their problems.

Mistborn did have a looser ending then normal, it still made sense in context as was mentioned above and is the only time he has ever really gone out of pocket like that. As for the other two? When you say it like that and ignore every surrounding detail, piece of foreshadowing, character beat, and plot point leading up to the then sure it sounds stupid. And what does it matter that a character used deific powers or was erroneously called a god king? Can I double check what you think a dues ex machina is?






I used the examples I did because those are his books that I've read. After WoT I decided to stop subjecting myself to Sanderson. I've been told before that his writing matured recently, but it's a bit like someone telling you to stick your fingers into a blender with the promise it won't hurt as much as it used to. I haven't read all of his works, but after 8 of his novels that were all absolutely dreadful I feel like I gave him enough chances.

He does do great world building. I won't dispute that. It's just a shame that the stories he tells in those worlds are so bad.

Oh, you have barely read any of his work anyways.

[Eldan]

The point of a Deus Ex Machina is that there's no setup for it. If we have two books of "This is how you get godlike power", a list of people who previously had that godlike power, a prophecy that soon someone will get that godlike power, specific criteria for who can get the godlike power and several mentions of how the previous holders of the godlike powers can't hold on to them, if then that someone gets that godlike power, that's not a Deus Ex Machina.

[Dragonus45]

The point of a Deus Ex Machina is that there's no setup for it. If we have two books of "This is how you get godlike power", a list of people who previously had that godlike power, a prophecy that soon someone will get that godlike power, specific criteria for who can get the godlike power and several mentions of how the previous holders of the godlike powers can't hold on to them, if then that someone gets that godlike power, that's not a Deus Ex Machina.

He didn't entirely properly foreshadow the first books ending though, and while it was meant to be a mystery in universe how it happened across the next two book leading into the climax of the third it does stand out relative to his other work.

[Anteros]

Mistborn did have a looser ending then normal, it still made sense in context as was mentioned above and is the only time he has ever really gone out of pocket like that. As for the other two? When you say it like that and ignore every surrounding detail, piece of foreshadowing, character beat, and plot point leading up to the then sure it sounds stupid. And what does it matter that a character used deific powers or was erroneously called a god king? Can I double check what you think a dues ex machina is?


Oh, you have barely read any of his work anyways.

Foreshadowing doesn't necessarily mean it can't be Deus ex Machina. If the labors of hercules ended with Zeus descending and solving all his problems it would still be deus ex machina despite Zeus literally being his dad. If OOTS ends with Thor smiting Xykon it would still be deus ex machina despite Thor being an established character with an invested interest in the plot.

And yes, "barely any of his work". A mere 8 novels. A paltry 10,000 words. A mere 3x the entirety of Game of Thrones. Certainly not enough to get a feel for an author.

[Dragonus45]

Foreshadowing doesn't necessarily mean it can't be Deus ex Machina. If the labors of hercules ended with Zeus descending and solving all his problems it would still be deus ex machina despite Zeus literally being his dad. If OOTS ends with Thor smiting Xykon it would still be deus ex machina despite Thor being an established character with an invested interest in the plot.

And yes, "barely any of his work". A mere 8 novels. A paltry 10,000 words. A mere 3x the entirety of Game of Thrones. Certainly not enough to get a feel for an author.

No, by definition Dues ex Machina means something doesn't have foreshadowing. If it were implied there was some set of conditions that could allow Thor to vaporize Xykon ahead of time then no it wouldn't be Deus ex Machina.

Considering that having to be the person to finish Wheel of Time was always going to be thankless and miserable even though he did do about as good of a job as anyone could have given the situation but it was also decidedly not "his work" in a real sense. Glad we agree that that really is a paltry amount of words though considering it's barely over a percent of what he has actually written word count wise though.

[Mechalich]

Sanderson, as an author, is interested in systems more than story or characters. That's hardly unknown, and many famous authors, such as Isaac Asimov have been similar. Asimov, in particular, bears many similarities to Sanderson - incredible prolificacy, a tendency toward weak conclusions, and a desire to blend too many ideas together at once. The key difference, I find, is that Asimov was a science fiction author and Sanderson is a fantasy one. Asimov explored systems that while speculative, might at least theoretically exist to some degree. Sanderson explores systems that he completely made up.

Reading a Sanderson novel is rather like watching a Let's Play of a game the player invented, and tolerance for that varies a lot. By comparison, reading an Asimov or other systems focused science fiction novel is like watching a Let's Play of a heavily-modded version of life as we know it, which is a significantly more substantial hook. Personally, I really wish Sanderson had gone down the science fiction route rather than the fantasy one. There are too few authors willing to fully investigate the implications of things like torchship drives, Von Neumann asteroid mining machinery, and so forth, especially who can do so in a highly engaging and rapidly readable way.

[Rodin]

Deus Ex Machinas in particular are from Greek plays where the stupid humans would get things so screwed up that nobody could fix it, and then the gods would come in and sort everything out with a wave of their hands while giving a moralistic lesson about how all of this could have been avoided.

Mistborn...isn't that. The first novel is inarguably a Deus Ex Machina by the modern definition - Vin gets superpowers out of nowhere that allow her to defeat the villain. However, the novel was clearly meant as part of a series and the "What the hell just happened" nature of the resolution is brought up by the characters as well - a clear indication that an explanation will be forthcoming.

The series as a whole definitely doesn't fit. In fact, it's kind of the opposite! What wasn't mentioned earlier is that the first person to get godlike power screws it up. Them screwing it up informs the backstory of the entire setting. And then the second person gets it...and makes things worse.

It's only after the plot is basically resolved (heroes dead, villains dead) that a secondary character takes the reins and his knowledge that had been established across three books is what allows him to stop the end of the world.

The one point where I can point to an unambiguous Deus Ex Machina is in the Wax and Wayne books, where literal God arranges for Wax to get his weapons back for the final confrontation of the first book. And even that is suitably lampshaded.

[Mechalich]

Deus Ex Machinas in particular are from Greek plays where the stupid humans would get things so screwed up that nobody could fix it, and then the gods would come in and sort everything out with a wave of their hands while giving a moralistic lesson about how all of this could have been avoided.

Mistborn...isn't that. The first novel is inarguably a Deus Ex Machina by the modern definition - Vin gets superpowers out of nowhere that allow her to defeat the villain. However, the novel was clearly meant as part of a series and the "What the hell just happened" nature of the resolution is brought up by the characters as well - a clear indication that an explanation will be forthcoming.

The series as a whole definitely doesn't fit. In fact, it's kind of the opposite! What wasn't mentioned earlier is that the first person to get godlike power screws it up. Them screwing it up informs the backstory of the entire setting. And then the second person gets it...and makes things worse.

It's only after the plot is basically resolved (heroes dead, villains dead) that a secondary character takes the reins and his knowledge that had been established across three books is what allows him to stop the end of the world.

The one point where I can point to an unambiguous Deus Ex Machina is in the Wax and Wayne books, where literal God arranges for Wax to get his weapons back for the final confrontation of the first book. And even that is suitably lampshaded.

Rather than desu ex machinas, it's probably more reasonable to argue that Sanderson has a problem with abrupt shifts in power level, both at the character scale and at the setting scale. This circles back to his system interest and how he chooses to build systems. He's fond of stepped progressions with abrupt break points rather than gradual increases. Stormlight Archive, with its series of vows that each provide sequential, massive, power boosts is perhaps the most obvious about this, but it can be traced back all the way to Elantris, where the overarching system seems to having only two states: fully functional and completely broken.

And I get why he does that, since it makes it easy to simply flip a metaphorical switch and change the power balance from 'we're totally screwed' to 'victory!' at a stroke, and in the kind of personal power > societal power quasi-superhero settings Sanderson uses that's effective. The downside is that it quickly becomes predictable.

[Dragonus45]

Rather than desu ex machinas, it's probably more reasonable to argue that Sanderson has a problem with abrupt shifts in power level, both at the character scale and at the setting scale. This circles back to his system interest and how he chooses to build systems. He's fond of stepped progressions with abrupt break points rather than gradual increases. Stormlight Archive, with its series of vows that each provide sequential, massive, power boosts is perhaps the most obvious about this, but it can be traced back all the way to Elantris, where the overarching system seems to having only two states: fully functional and completely broken.

And I get why he does that, since it makes it easy to simply flip a metaphorical switch and change the power balance from 'we're totally screwed' to 'victory!' at a stroke, and in the kind of personal power > societal power quasi-superhero settings Sanderson uses that's effective. The downside is that it quickly becomes predictable.

The vows in Stormlight Archive are interesting because aside from getting a decently steep power boost overall they also come with what is effectively a free recharge on mana.

[Taevyr]

Rather than desu ex machinas, it's probably more reasonable to argue that Sanderson has a problem with abrupt shifts in power level, both at the character scale and at the setting scale. This circles back to his system interest and how he chooses to build systems. He's fond of stepped progressions with abrupt break points rather than gradual increases. Stormlight Archive, with its series of vows that each provide sequential, massive, power boosts is perhaps the most obvious about this, but it can be traced back all the way to Elantris, where the overarching system seems to having only two states: fully functional and completely broken.

And I get why he does that, since it makes it easy to simply flip a metaphorical switch and change the power balance from 'we're totally screwed' to 'victory!' at a stroke, and in the kind of personal power > societal power quasi-superhero settings Sanderson uses that's effective. The downside is that it quickly becomes predictable.

I agree with this, and with Stormlight probably doing it best: it's still predictable, but due to it being so deeply tied to the given character's development and growth (or lack of such) it still gives that catharsis you need at such key moments. It's also one of the main reasons for the "Marvel of Fantasy" view some people have of him, which I mentioned earlier.

I personally tend to prefer his novels that don't go quite as big with power levels/explosions: probably why I enjoyed Emperor's Soul and Shadows of Self so much. Ironically, I feel he writes better when there aren't any of his trademark over-the-top stakes at play.


Also, concerning Elantris' "on-off" analogy: I'm still amused by a friend in IT who summed up the plot as City built on magic programming bugs out when nature adds a semi-colon. It's a perfect example of Sanderson essentially being a "Science-fantasy" writer, particularly because it's an early work where his skill at systems vastly outstrips his skill at character writing.

[Mechalich]

I agree with this, and with Stormlight probably doing it best: it's still predictable, but due to it being so deeply tied to the given character's development and growth (or lack of such) it still gives that catharsis you need at such key moments.

Personally I find the whole process wears out its welcome in Stormlight, but that probably has more to do with that series' preposterously oversized nature. Rhythm of War, in particular, manages to choreograph Kaladin's big upgrade from something like 800 pages out, which means an even marginally astute reader spends an entire trilogy's worth of words knowing, broadly, the notes that are going to happen at the climax, which is absolutely ridiculous. Though admittedly this seems to have become a genre-wide problem. In general I'm really skeptical that any story needs millions of words to function.

[Dragonus45]

Personally I find the whole process wears out its welcome in Stormlight, but that probably has more to do with that series' preposterously oversized nature. Rhythm of War, in particular, manages to choreograph Kaladin's big upgrade from something like 800 pages out, which means an even marginally astute reader spends an entire trilogy's worth of words knowing, broadly, the notes that are going to happen at the climax, which is absolutely ridiculous. Though admittedly this seems to have become a genre-wide problem. In general I'm really skeptical that any story needs millions of words to function.

His breakdown and the fake out for him speaking the next oath in the third book were great swerves though, sure you knew it would come along in the next book by some means or another but Oathbringer was a gut punch in part because it broke up the pattern you sort of came to expect a little. Also the method for how he finally made peace when he had a chance to say goodbye properly Tien was an emotional uppercut. I actually teared up a bit just thinking about it.

[warty goblin]

I agree with this, and with Stormlight probably doing it best: it's still predictable, but due to it being so deeply tied to the given character's development and growth (or lack of such) it still gives that catharsis you need at such key moments. It's also one of the main reasons for the "Marvel of Fantasy" view some people have of him, which I mentioned earlier.


This would probably be why I didn't like Mistborn, the only Sanderson novel I ever picked up... only to put it down halfway through... only to finish the damn thing a couple months later when completely out of things to read.

It felt like a super herostory. And not a fun silly superhero story with lots of goofy powers, or a deeply written one that used the powers as a metaphor for character growth or adulthood or technological change or anything. No, it was a superhero story whose interests began and ended with the protagonist's current set of made up powers, as if I should be deeply engaged by "this character can run fast" as a concept.

And my God but the prose was refined weapons grade dull. I've read bad writing that was honestly more engaging because bad writing can at least have some verve and personality. Sanderson is the prose equivalent of institutional beige wallpaper


Personally I find the whole process wears out its welcome in Stormlight, but that probably has more to do with that series' preposterously oversized nature. Rhythm of War, in particular, manages to choreograph Kaladin's big upgrade from something like 800 pages out, which means an even marginally astute reader spends an entire trilogy's worth of words knowing, broadly, the notes that are going to happen at the climax, which is absolutely ridiculous. Though admittedly this seems to have become a genre-wide problem. In general I'm really skeptical that any story needs millions of words to function.

There's a couple really long series I think are at least mostly worth it. Night's Dawn is like a 6000 page trilogy, and I think generally makes that work. It's a galactic scale story though, and uses that enormous length to explore the effects of the plot problem on people in about every walk of life in said galaxy. You could cut a couple of the less or solution relevant viewpoint characters and have the story work, but it would lose the all encompassing effect it has.

I quite liked Elizabeth Haydon's Symphony of Ages series, which weighs in at 9 books (my copies total 4800 pages) and I think it justifies that length. It helps that the first three make a fairly self cobtained trilogy, so if you don't want more you can stop there and have a satisfying ending. Books 4 and 5 also end their story pretty well, though they do a lot of setu for the next books so don't wrap things up completely. Books 6 - 8 are a trilogy, which while not self contained (you really do need the first 5) again end in satisfying fashion. Book 9 is an entirely different beast, and only strictly necessary if you want all the loose ends wrapped up. It's probably one of my favorite pieces of fantasy though, so while the story functions fine without it, it's absolutely worth the effort.

[Eldan]

Personally, I read Stormlight mainly for the illustrations of giant crab monsters and weird clothes. There's also a book attached, which is a bonus.

[GloatingSwine]

Personally, I read Stormlight mainly for the illustrations of giant crab monsters and weird clothes. There's also a book attached, which is a bonus.

It should come as absolutely no surprise that Brandon Sanderson is a big fan of the Dark Souls games...


(My patience for giant tomes is not what it was.)

[LaZodiac]

You know, dragging everyone away from the Sanderson discussion, here's another recommendation: The Mortal Engine series. The first one is a little shaky, but the rest are fantastic, and the way it ends is just, perfection. Made me cry real tears.

On the older line of things I'll always recommend The Deathgate Cycle. I hunted down every book in that one as a child, it's my Dragonlance, and it absolutely owns.

[Taevyr]

And my God but the prose was refined weapons grade dull. I've read bad writing that was honestly more engaging because bad writing can at least have some verve and personality. Sanderson is the prose equivalent of institutional beige wallpaper

I wouldn't call his prose "bad", just prosaic: simple and unremarkable. It serves its function without the usual bells and whistles that makes the prose of most fantasy books so engaging. He can do less prosaic stuff, such as his work on WoT, and it has improved over time, but I think part of why he's able to write the amount of books he does is because his prose is generally... "bland" is the wrong word as it's a tad too denigrating, but I can't think of a better one atm. The story that's being told is enjoyable, which is what I care about most in the end.

Not to mention that if his prose was more purple, I wouldn't be able to switch to him whenever I feel like reading something a bit more straightforward and vice versa. Sometimes you need a palate cleanser after finishing some heavier stuff.

[Wookieetank]

(My patience for giant tomes is not what it was.)

Depends on the Genre for me. Sci-fi and Horror, I'll happily dive into any length book. Fantasy, I've come to appreciate in shorter form, preferably 350pages or less. Probably helps that I've read a number of fantasy short story collections this year which had rather well put together stories in them, so my tolerance for filler in fantasy is rather low at the moment.

[warty goblin]

You know, dragging everyone away from the Sanderson discussion, here's another recommendation: The Mortal Engine series. The first one is a little shaky, but the rest are fantastic, and the way it ends is just, perfection. Made me cry real tears.

On the older line of things I'll always recommend The Deathgate Cycle. I hunted down every book in that one as a child, it's my Dragonlance, and it absolutely owns.

Haven't read Mortal Engines, will check out, thanks for the recommendation!

I absolutely second Death Gate, I reread it about four years ago and it remains a really top notch piece of work. I love the steady scope expansion over the first few books, the occasional detours into epistolary novel, and just how much top notch worldbuilding W&H poured into it. It's the kind of worldbuilding I really like too, mostly interested in the world itself and not the protagonist's super powers. The ending also requires a special shout out, because it's really strong.


I wouldn't call his prose "bad", just prosaic: simple and unremarkable. It serves its function without the usual bells and whistles that makes the prose of most fantasy books so engaging. He can do less prosaic stuff, such as his work on WoT, and it has improved over time, but I think part of why he's able to write the amount of books he does is because his prose is generally... "bland" is the wrong word as it's a tad too denigrating, but I can't think of a better one atm. The story that's being told is enjoyable, which is what I care about most in the end.


I wouldn't call his prose bad either, technically it's fine. It absolutely is bland though, in that I never hit a clever turn of phrase, a metaphor that really made something resonate or pop, a tone shift, or anything beyond simple descriptive sentence after simple descriptive sentence fading into beige tedium.

This is not because he writes simple prose. Lots of people do that and still have distinct and engaging narrative voice. Stephan King uses very simple language, but his writing manipulates tone and atmosphere masterfully, there's a couple passages of Salem's Lot that I read put loud occasionally because they're so well constructed. I'm reading A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik right now, the language is extremely straightforward, but it conveys the narrator's gallows humor covering up sheer pulsing terror extremely well.


Not to mention that if his prose was more purple, I wouldn't be able to switch to him whenever I feel like reading something a bit more straightforward and vice versa. Sometimes you need a palate cleanser after finishing some heavier stuff.

Lots of people write non-purple prose that is, as prose, engaging and lively and full of style and personality. Really, most halfway decent modern writing is like this, because flowery and complex language has been out of fashion for a century or more now. The last person I can think of who was actually good at really genuinely complex, ornate, and difficult prose in fantasy is Tanith Lee, and she's been dead for 7 years.

[Taevyr]

Lots of people write non-purple prose that is, as prose, engaging and lively and full of style and personality. Really, most halfway decent modern writing is like this, because flowery and complex language has been out of fashion for a century or more now. The last person I can think of who was actually good at really genuinely complex, ornate, and difficult prose in fantasy is Tanith Lee, and she's been dead for 7 years.

I'm aware, that's essentially what I meant with "purple prose": I just don't know a better word for it, and didn't feel like adding an extra paragraph to properly convey it.

I've heard about Deadly Education: might give it a try, since that description sounds right up my alley.

[Eldan]

Lots of people write non-purple prose that is, as prose, engaging and lively and full of style and personality. Really, most halfway decent modern writing is like this, because flowery and complex language has been out of fashion for a century or more now. The last person I can think of who was actually good at really genuinely complex, ornate, and difficult prose in fantasy is Tanith Lee, and she's been dead for 7 years.

Have you tried Susanna Clarke?

A Deadly Education is surprisingly fun. Like, there's so many YA clichés in there, but they are played with so well and the main character manages to be both thoroughly sarcastic and genuinely emotional in very engaging ways. Part three just came out this week, I'm just waiting for it to arrive.

[warty goblin]

Have you tried Susanna Clarke?

Not yet, though I've got Piranesi on the shelf, just waiting to be read. It's high on the queue, but the queue is long. Several bookshelves long.


A Deadly Education is surprisingly fun. Like, there's so many YA clichés in there, but they are played with so well and the main character manages to be both thoroughly sarcastic and genuinely emotional in very engaging ways. Part three just came out this week, I'm just waiting for it to arrive.

I wasn't super wild about it on my first read, but it's worth the revisit, I think my initial read was too strongly influenced by taking the first chapter as borderline parody, which clashed with the actual book. On reread it works a lot better because I get the story isn't actually tongue in cheek so much as a very amusingly written take on actually dark subject matter. There's definitely some tongue in cheek going on - the delightfully heavy handed cliches for instance - but it's not really the point.

I was hoping to get through both 1 and 2 before the third came out. Didn't quite make it though.

[Mechalich]

I wasn't super wild about it on my first read, but it's worth the revisit, I think my initial read was too strongly influenced by taking the first chapter as borderline parody, which clashed with the actual book. On reread it works a lot better because I get the story isn't actually tongue in cheek so much as a very amusingly written take on actually dark subject matter. There's definitely some tongue in cheek going on - the delightfully heavy handed cliches for instance - but it's not really the point.

I was hoping to get through both 1 and 2 before the third came out. Didn't quite make it though.

Personally, I think the Scholomance is best considered as a black comedy. It is a parody to at least some degree, because the numbers Novik throws out there are so far from being viable as that they can only be treated as absurd. Once you realize that, that it could not actually be as a bad as all this without the wizards having gone extinct millennia ago, it stabilizes into a darkly humorous bit of meta-commentary on YA grimdarkness.

[Dragonus45]

Personally, I think the Scholomance is best considered as a black comedy. It is a parody to at least some degree, because the numbers Novik throws out there are so far from being viable as that they can only be treated as absurd. Once you realize that, that it could not actually be as a bad as all this without the wizards having gone extinct millennia ago, it stabilizes into a darkly humorous bit of meta-commentary on YA grimdarkness.

Naomi Novik has a new series out after Temeraire!? I'll have to check this one out.

[Eldan]

Naomi Novik has a new series out after Temeraire!? I'll have to check this one out.

Several series, actually, but I haven't tried her others.

I'd call Deadly Education better than Temeraire. At least better than the later Temeraire books. They are very different in tone and genre, though. A Deadly Education is about a teenage protagonist with uniquely powerful magic at the most horrifying magic high school ever invented. I would call the genre "horror YA". Occasionally it's even existential horror. It's also funny.

[Eldan]

Not yet, though I've got Piranesi on the shelf, just waiting to be read. It's high on the queue, but the queue is long. Several bookshelves long.

I think you might like Piranesi, even if you and me seem to have pretty opposed tastes otherwise.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Wookieetank
Probably helps that I've read a number of fantasy short story collections this year which had rather well put together stories in them….

Any recommendations? I’m always open to good fantasy short stories.

[Melayl]

I kinda feel like that got wrapped up a bit too neatly, TBH... might wind up with a shake-up in the pack, but the main worry seems to have gotten resolved without much effort from Mercedes, and almost entirely off-screen.

I was a little surprised that we got another Bonarata novel, but Silence Fallen was 4 books at 5 years ago.

I don't think it has been resolved. It's been more delayed, I think. There's a *very* tentative equilibrium right now, IMO, that will rear up again.

I'm not too surprised by Bonarata showing back up. An ego like he was supposed to have wouldn't take well to being defeated on his home turf, and he's been used to getting everything he wants for several centuries. He'd almost *have* to do something to get back at them.

[LibraryOgre]

I'm not too surprised by Bonarata showing back up. An ego like he was supposed to have wouldn't take well to being defeated on his home turf, and he's been used to getting everything he wants for several centuries. He'd almost *have* to do something to get back at them.

Oh, I'm not surprised he came back; it tends to be werewolf, vampire, faerie

Moon Called (werewolf)
Blood Bound (vampire)
Iron Kissed (faerie)
Bone Cursed (vampire)
Silver Borne (werewolf)
River Marked (faerie)
Frost Burned (vampire)
Night Broken (werewolf)
Fire Touched (faerie)
Silence Fallen (vampire)
Storm Cursed (werewolf)
Smoke Bitten (faerie)
Soul Taken (vampire)

I was more surprised that it was a Bonarata book because I didn't realize how far back Silence Fallen was.

[KorvinStarmast]

Just finished Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. (Apparently, in a list compiled in 1998 of 20th century lit, it came in at 47. (Ulysses by James Joyce was in the top 3, which for my money was far too charitable, so take its ranking with a grain of salt).
Where to start.
a. It's written in a style that fits its time, where description was important (both physical description and the description of what the characters were feeling or thinking). But it is also written for its time frame, which was the New World before The Great War, and the story tells about things that mostly happened in (a fictional version of) the 19th century in the fictional land of Costaguana somewhere on the Pacific coast.
b. Some meta themes are very much on display, with a core plot element being how Europeans are attracted to treasures in the New World, even in the 19th century, and the stark difference between the Europeans, even second and third generation Costaguanans whose ancestors came from Europe, and the indigenous population. I'll not go further due to forum rules.
c. On display are a variety of characters and character types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
d. Deception, both of others and of self, crops up regularly.
e. The raw cruelty, and entropy, of the cycles of revolution that both changed, and did damage to, South and Central America during the 19th century is unapologetically represented.
f. There are some good plot twists.
g. There is not a happy ending.

A good read, but I can see the wisdom in its initial release as a serial.
Each chapter takes a bit of digesting as the story builds, block by block, to a sequence of climaxes that lead to the eventual, and somewhat unexpected, conclusion.

As a life long student of history, I particularly liked that one of the important characters is an expatriate Italian who was one of Garibaldi's One Thousand. (A veteran of Spedizione dei Mille). His occasional mini-rants about the betrayal of their revolution - by Cavour and Mazzini - is quite a contrast to the modern Italian hagiography of the three (Garibaldi, Cavour, and Mazzini) who each led the effort to unify Italy in their own, unique ways.
What it took me about half of the book to realize was that these early meditations by the old man about the people's revolution betrayed were a foreshadowing of various betrayals that crop up during the book. By the time it was over and I looked back on how Conrad had pieced it all together, I find that sub thread's weave into the fabric of the story to be masterful.

[warty goblin]

Am now just over halfway through The Last Graduate, the second Scholomance book. This one is, if anything, even more fun than the last one. It helps that it plays out over the course of months (I suspect a full year) rather than the days to weeks of the first novel, which gives everything a bit more space to breathe.

It also helps that Novik is a creative enough writer to really take advantage of the first person narration to fill up this space. Unlike a lot of first person books which are written like they're somehow a literal copy of the protagonist's thoughts and actions, this is explicitly a told (or rather written) account. So it's entirely natural for the narrator to leave things out until they're relevant, or go on long tangents, or make jokes because those are the things a person telling a story does. It isn't explicit when or how the account is written, it isn't a diary format and doesn't have a diagetic introduction explaining its origins or anything, but it makes for a pretty lively read. The told story nature also allows for time to be condensed or summarized really flexibly, so endless graduation practice doesn't take up tons of page count on repetitive action scenes.

This is great. Easily the most fun and best executed piece of genuinely contemporary fantasy I've read in a while.

[Eldan]

I just finished The Golden Enclaves, which came out last week, sequel to The Last Graduate Warty Goblin mentions above.

Compared to the others, it's quite a bit slower in the first half. Then comes the second half which is... interesting. I enjoyed it, even if it's a bit different, and it wraps up more story threads than I thought could be wrapped up in just one more book, in ways that are satisfactory and not entirely expected.

[Eldan]

Also, I'm kind of unreasonably happy that we seem to have found a book we both like? I usually like your takes on literature a lot, but we seem to disagree on almost all the books we read.

[warty goblin]

Wrapped up The Last Graduate last night, I pretty much just binge read the last 90 pages, I love it when a book grabs me like that.

Ending was good. There were some aspects that I definitely saw coming, but this isn't a bad thing. More like a really satisfying payoff. The final plan however I definitely did not anticipate, but boy was it fun.

Two things I very much liked were that the PoV character gets stuff wrong, or incompletely right, but because the reader is really stuck in her view, it doesn't necessarily seem wrong until the character realizes it. This is just really solid writing. The other thing I really liked was how Orion was characterized. It would have been so easy for Galadriel's understanding of his past and desires to have been right, and have him be just this sad rescue case guy, instead of just entirely weird, emotionally pretty self sufficient, and doing his own thing.


Sadly, I won't get my copy of the next book until tomorrow, due to complicated logistical nonsense. This leaves a book shaped lacuna in my life for the rest of today, which I'm going to fill with some short stories from those humorous Amazon anthologies Esher Freisner edited back in like the nineties. These are dumb fun in a sort of reverse exploitation movie way, i.e. silly, know it, and totally off the hook content wise. Seriously, at least every fourth story would probably get the author turbo-cancelled if the sort of person interested in turbo-cancelling read ancient short story collections with babes in bronze bikinis on the cover.



Also, I'm kind of unreasonably happy that we seem to have found a book we both like? I usually like your takes on literature a lot, but we seem to disagree on almost all the books we read.

It is a nice change of pace. I always like to see what you think about books as well, even when I disagree, your opinions are interesting and well reasoned.

[Eldan]

Thinking about it a bit more, I'm having thoughts about the ethical aspects of the third book that will probably need a few days to percolate in my head. I'm now no longer sure if I like all of it (it's still a very good read). Remind me again once you've read it.

[Bohandas]

for the Halloween season I'm checking out the Titus Crow novels

[Saintheart]

Making a proper read of Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth after having done a sort-of skim read some years ago and abandoned the book to my shelf unimpressed.

This time round, doing more. And thoroughly enjoying it. Straight medieval drama, but maybe Follett's style is just growing on me as I get older.

[Bohandas]

Also for Halloween season I've read Bram Stoker's novels, Dracula and Lair of the White Worm. And having read White Worm and having also read most of H.P.Lovecraft's stories I've gotta say, Bram Stoker is WAY more racist than H.P.Lovecraft ever was; The secondary villain's black henchman is somehow made out to be worse than the titular man-eating dragon, and every second word in the book is the n word.

[The Glyphstone]

Count me in as a third person who's read and enjoyed the Scholomance books, though the 3rd one left me feeling slightly unsatisfied somehow.


I was expecting there to be some sort of consequence to essentially killing+resurrecting Orion in tandem with the shelter spells, like him being bound to the school in some fashion. But unless I missed a subtlety, he's just alive and happily purified, which rang odd with how Novak otherwise really liked to lean into the "magic has a nasty price" theme.

[Eldan]

Yeah, that.
(More Scholomance 3 discussion)
Two things I didn't really like about the books, but I feel difficult to put in words.

Resurrecting Orion felt very... I don't even know. Power of Friendship/we can all do this together etc. Everyone quite literally comes together and then there's a golden light and he's saved. Now, it was all set up, and set up well. By the rules of the various magics involved, i.e. the Golden Sutras/Void foundation stones/Maw Mouths, it made sense. She's doing the same to him as she did to the enclaves, replacing his foundation stone.

But it still feels too clean. In fact, I thought everything about the ending was too clean. For the last few books, magic always felt messier than that, and I liked it. Yes, there should have been more consequence. Him bound to the school and unable to see El again (because she can't easily go back, once it's operational) would still have felt like a net positive, but at least a bit bittersweet. Him turning into some kind of new disembodied consciousness of the school, perhaps? Him losing all his power? There would have been ways to do this more messily.

The other thing that didn't quite sit right with me and I find hard to put in words is how much everyone was in on it. Every enclave council member knows how enclaves are made, everyone was creating maw mouths, etc. It just puts everyone neatly into oen block that El can deal with as one group. I mean, she doesn't, in the end, she needs to hunt down maw mouths across the world one by one and it's hard, but it just kind of makes the enclaves feel like one monolithic evil power block and I'm not sure I like that. Even if they were all under a compulsion not to change anything about the system. That just makes it even... neater.

Hmm. Okay, different tack. One thing I liked a lot about this book series so far was that there wasn't really anyone evil. Or not evil without reason. Every time El thought she could just condemn someone and maybe blast them, she got insight into why they were like this. And I liked that.

The Enclave founding secret doesn't quite work like that. Yes, they were all desperate to have an enclave, and they were all willing to engage in very dark magic to do it. But the way the compulsion works actually undermines this principle of the books for me. They didn't know what they were getting into, before they got into it. And once they were in, they couldn't tell anyone and had to continue doing it and that feels a cop-out almost. I would have liked there to be a bit more variety among enclave high-ups, some who refused, and some who walked away, and some who were willing to do it even knowing what the cost is. BUt of course you can't have anyone walking away, or the secret would get out.

I don't know. I feel like I'm rambling and I can't quite put into words what my problem is.

Also, they are still very good books.

[Wookieetank]

for the Halloween season I'm checking out the Titus Crow novels

Hope you enjoy them, they're fun/interesting (and have some Doctor who vibes going on too). Really should get back to finishing those myself, got sidetracked partway through book 2.

[The Glyphstone]

I'm starting another periodic reread of the entire Ring of Fire series in prep for the 1637 book about to come out.

[warty goblin]

Finished The Golden Enclaves last night in a 200 page gulp. This means I liked the book.

Interestingly I think I enjoyed the novel more for the thematic and moral content it explored than the plot or action. I'm not shortchanging those, they were all good, but the series was absolutely unafraid to go some gnarly places with its concepts.


So what the first book didn't really get into, the second touched on, and the third absolutely focused on was, essentially negative externalities. Except in fine fantasy tradition it took something invisible and abstract like air pollution and turned it into monsters eating kids. And then made the best solution to a monster eating your kid turning to magic that diffusely but directly caused more monsters to eat more kids.

This is a really excellent way to explore a sort of positive/negative feedback loop I've always found fascinating; namely where the best move for an individual is the worst move for the group.

What really makes the series work for me is that it never shies away from either thr consequences of wizards using malia or otherwise using other people to insulate themselves, or that them doing so is both justifiable and utterly inevitable. Both the first and second book I think showed this pretty well at essentially the individual scale.

What impressed me about the third book is that it took the same logic, raised the cost (hell-torturing people into maw-mouths) and the scale of the problem (if you don't do that to someone, it's going to happen to your kids).

I think this is the point of the compulsion that comes with the enclave spells; it keeps people from saying the quiet part out loud. Like sure if you think about it the whole point of an enclave is to use everyone outside as a power source and ablative meat shield for little Timmy, but you can't say that. Really, the fact that the enclaves are all built on maw-mouths is almost irrelevant, it's just turning the thematic content into literal plot.

The final interesting bit to me is that you can take this metaphor as far as you want. I think the books are perfectly readable as a tropey high school is hell story with a bit more nuance than most. But you can pretty easily read it as being, if not directly about, then a useful lense for considering issues like climate change, or educational inequality, or outsourced industrialization, or pretty much the entire post WW2 world order if you want. The text doesn't force you to do that, but the metaphor at the core is both flexible enough and broad enough you can use the text to think about a lot if issues. This might be the most impressive thing about the series to me.




Overall I'd say it's like 7/10 for plot, but it's rich enough in theme and so damn much fun to read I'd give it like 9.5/10 overall.

[Bohandas]

Hope you enjoy them, they're fun/interesting (and have some Doctor who vibes going on too).

That's exactly what I thought. That time machine is almost exactly the TARDIS.

[Eldan]

Overall I'd say it's like 7/10 for plot, but it's rich enough in theme and so damn much fun to read I'd give it like 9.5/10 overall.

So, going back to the spoiler discussion last page, what did you think of the ending and how everything was resolved?

Short version:
Glyph and I bought thought it was a bit too clean and neat, and there should have been some cost to saving Orion, instead of what basically felt like everyone coming together and wishing really hard.

[warty goblin]

So, going back to the spoiler discussion last page, what did you think of the ending and how everything was resolved?

Short version:
Glyph and I bought thought it was a bit too clean and neat, and there should have been some cost to saving Orion, instead of what basically felt like everyone coming together and wishing really hard.


I thought it was a bit too neat at first, but it's only personally neat. Sure she saved Orion, but people are 100% going to keep making maw-mouths. That's way darker and messier than I thought it was going to go.

I think saving Orion is also important because the fundamental problem the books are entirely structural. They aren't fixed by big heroic sacrifices, they're fixed by people making different choices. Orion chose.



I've also read reviews that said the ending was too dark and unsatisfying because it wasn't a literal happy ever after which just left me going whaaa?


Edit: more thoughts


So I really appreciate in general how fast the book moved. Fantasy tends to draaag ooon a lot of the time (sometimes for like, literal books) but this, both as a book and series definitely didn't. That's good.

But it made the ending with Orion feel rushed. We learn he's a maw-mouth right before the climax, and that entire plot thread is wrapped up immediately. So it never really has a chance to register as a problem, particularly since he's hardly been a character in the third book.

I feel like there needed to be more space between revelation and resolution there. I think the resolution is basically fine, and in some ways a really excellent capstone to both El and Orion's character arcs (she actually asks somebody nicely, he is actually valued) but it's so close to understanding the problem that we don't get to sit with the alternative very long. There's no failed effort to save him first, no wrestling with needing to kill him, just problem and resolution.



Anyway, after that shocking brush with reading cuurent things that people know about, I've scuttled back to irrelevant and aged obscurity, and picked up The Ring of Ikribu. This is a Red Sonja novel, and is fairly boilerplate sword and sorcery, albeit better written than it has any right to be. Like seriously, this is actually solid and enjoyable prose and character work, with just the right combination of florid and spare muscularity that makes S&S fun. Probably not worth the effort of tracking down, but fun enough if you feel like hot-blooded stories about low fantasy characters chopping winged zombies out of the air in sprays of crimson.

[Velaryon]

I recently powered through the autobiographies of Rob Halford and K.K. Downing from Judas Priest (Confess and Heavy Duty, respectively). It was interesting seeing their vastly different points of view on their careers and success. I got some definite sour grapes vibes from Downing, but there are a few places where it's also easier to believe his version of events over Halford's. For instance...Rob Halford's version of the story about why he left Judas Priest in the 90's was that it was basically an accidental misunderstanding that he just... didn't correct for some reason.

Basically, he says he had been wanting for some time to start a side project to test his own creative chops independently of his Judas Priest bandmates. He claims that all of the other band members were aware of this and all gave their blessing. He then says that a record company executive told him that in order to start his contract for his side project, he would have to formally quit Judas Priest, which he thought was just a technicality and not really true, so he agreed to it. Then word got to the rest of the band that he was quitting, and so he... stayed silent about it? Made not one attempt to contact any of them or set the record straight? Didn't call up the record company to say "hey wait a minute, this isn't what I wanted?" Didn't say anything in interviews? That seems a little hard to believe.

Downing says that Halford was adamant about quitting, and that he (Downing) considered solo projects to be a sort of betrayal of the band. Considering that the band lost their contract without Halford and ended up on a smaller indy label, I'm inclined to think there might be more truth to this version of events than Halford's "oops, I never meant to quit but I was too embarrassed to say anything about it, especially when the band announced they were looking for a new singer to replace me."

On the fiction front, I discovered recently that there was a prequel novella to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, specifically a story about the aeronaut Lee Scoresby called Once Upon a Time in the North. I've started reading it, and so far it's... eh. It isn't terrible, but Scoresby is kind of flat as a character, and the story really just feels kinda unnecessary so far. I'm hoping that it will get better, especially since it's supposed to be the story of how he befriended Iorek Byrnison, the king of the bears who was one of my favorite characters in the series (and who I thought was criminally underused after the first book).

[LibraryOgre]

Rereading "So You want to be a Wizard" by Diane Duane. It is such a joyous book.

However, a thought about the Mercy Thompson Universe... a gray witch could have a ton of power just hanging around werewolves. "Oh, your transformation is 10 minutes of excrucitiating pain? I can use that!"

[Mechalich]

I think saving Orion is also important because the fundamental problem the books are entirely structural. They aren't fixed by big heroic sacrifices, they're fixed by people making different choices. Orion chose.


The fundamental problem isn't structural, or it isn't structural at the human level, it has to do with how the overall magic system works. Specifically, magical power is drawn from living energy. Sometimes that's accumulated freely through physical or emotional exertion and storage by the user, as mana, and other times its just stolen from another organism as malia. There's no natural reservoir of magical power at all, and because the theft of life energy produces mals that both burn through mana and malia simply by existing and also eat it from other sources, it's actually a negative sum system - all magic does is drain the world. This is of course part and parcel with the bad math, the Scholomance fundamentally doesn't work as a universe, there is no sustainable level of wizardry at all and the casualty levels are so high that they went extinct almost as soon as they began.

Insofar as the books offer a solution its a combination of conservation and redistribution empowered by a technological rediscovery and an extremely direct threat that those who fail to adopt will be purged. It's not a complete solution by any means, there's still not enough power to go around and people will still cheat, inevitably, because this is a universe in which you can kill people for power, which is one of the fundamental principles of grimdark.

In many fantasy universes there's an interesting question of: does the existence of the supernatural make the world a better place? In the Scholomance that answer is a resounding, no, no it does not. The outright obliteration of magic would be a massive win for the world at large, and actually the extremely strong natural rejection of magic by mundanes suggests that some sort of universal level everyone knows that. Of course, given the numbers postulated, that should have already happened, which is possibly the joke.

[Thane of Fife]

[spoiler]Anyway, after that shocking brush with reading cuurent things that people know about, I've scuttled back to irrelevant and aged obscurity, and picked up The Ring of Ikribu. This is a Red Sonja novel, and is fairly boilerplate sword and sorcery, albeit better written than it has any right to be. Like seriously, this is actually solid and enjoyable prose and character work, with just the right combination of florid and spare muscularity that makes S&S fun. Probably not worth the effort of tracking down, but fun enough if you feel like hot-blooded stories about low fantasy characters chopping winged zombies out of the air in sprays of crimson.

Mmm. I wasn't a big fan of that one. Aesthetically, it was a bit too fantastic for my S&S tastes (though that's fairly common with Red Sonja), but I also seem tor ecall that she never really did anything - she basically was just working as a bodyguard for another character the whole time.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Rereading "So You want to be a Wizard" by Diane Duane. It is such a joyous book.

However, a thought about the Mercy Thompson Universe... a gray witch could have a ton of power just hanging around werewolves. "Oh, your transformation is 10 minutes of excrucitiating pain? I can use that!"

Love that series. A few years ago, I was surprised to learn that there were two new books out for it: A Wizard of Mars and Games Wizards Play. Well, for a given value of "new", they came out in 2010 and 2016 respectively, but still a pleasant surprise. Also, according to Goodreads there are a whole bunch of short stories set between and after those two, which I didn't know about. I'll have to track those down at some point.

RE grey witches, I think most packs don't transform nearly as often as Adam's and the Marrok's, so you'd only really be raking in power on the full moon (that'd be a heck of a windfall, though, if you could capture enough of it). Even a white witch that was a werewolf themself would rapidly become nightmarishly powerful, though. That's of course why vampires and werewolves are so careful not to turn anyone that's already supernatural; you're almost certainly creating a creature that's more powerful than anyone in your friend group.

[Bohandas]

Just finished Frankenstein. I've been driven to distraction trying to figure out just what, precisely, is wrong with the two main characters.

Victor's account of his early life includes several instances where he suddenly and inexplicably loses interest in things he was previously passionate about, culminating in the inexplicable abandonment of his life's work which sets off the events of the latter part of the book.

As for the Monster, he would have one believe that his murderous behavior was the result of the abuse he continually suffered, but that falls short. The 1800's had no shortage of people who had been rejected and trampled on by society, and the vast majority of them did not turn to murder as an outlet for their sorrows. Furthermore there were vast demographics in that time that had it significantly worse than the monster did, native americans, austrailian aboriginies, slaves, and even just the bog standard homeless, who - lacking the monster's self-sufficiency - are forced by necessity to live within the societies that rejected them and continuously trampled them down. But these wretches did not as a rule turn to murder the way the Monster did. Furthermore still, none of the people that the monster murders are people who have wronged him or whose deaths could ameliorate his position. The Monster has in him some uncommon propensity for murder and bloodshed.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Furthermore still, none of the people that the monster murders are people who have wronged him or whose deaths could ameliorate his position. The Monster has in him some uncommon propensity for murder and bloodshed.

Yeah that was my big hangup with the book too. And then afterwards the monster complains no one wants anything to do with him, like it’s not his fault people are afraid of him. :smallannoyed:

[LaZodiac]

Just finished Frankenstein. I've been driven to distraction trying to figure out just what, precisely, is wrong with the two main characters.

Victor's account of his early life includes several instances where he suddenly and inexplicably loses interest in things he was previously passionate about, culminating in the inexplicable abandonment of his life's work which sets off the events of the latter part of the book.

As for the Monster, he would have one believe that his murderous behavior was the result of the abuse he continually suffered, but that falls short. The 1800's had no shortage of people who had been rejected and trampled on by society, and the vast majority of them did not turn to murder as an outlet for their sorrows. Furthermore there were vast demographics in that time that had it significantly worse than the monster did, native americans, austrailian aboriginies, slaves, and even just the bog standard homeless, who - lacking the monster's self-sufficiency - are forced by necessity to live within the societies that rejected them and continuously trampled them down. But these wretches did not as a rule turn to murder the way the Monster did. Furthermore still, none of the people that the monster murders are people who have wronged him or whose deaths could ameliorate his position. The Monster has in him some uncommon propensity for murder and bloodshed.

It has been awhile since I've read Frankenstein but this feels like The Point Of The Novel.

[Wookieetank]

It has been awhile since I've read Frankenstein but this feels like The Point Of The Novel.

Pretty much. The ending very much gave the impression of the monster being a fugitive on the run from the authorities (Frankenstien).

Been reading through Needful Things by Stephen King for spooky season. Made it about halfway through so far, and its been an interesting read. Does a rather detailed job of looking at how interconnected small towns can be, and how minor events can cascade into larger more disasterous ones. Also takes a hard look at obsession, and the lengths people will go to in order to get (and keep) what they're obsessed with. Granted there's some supernatural persuasion at work feeding the obsessions, but it does make for some good food for thought to ruminated on what am I obsessed with myself, and where do I draw my lines.

[The_Snark]

Just finished Frankenstein. I've been driven to distraction trying to figure out just what, precisely, is wrong with the two main characters.

So many things!

Although with regards to the monster, I think it's important to remember that he's very, very young. He comes into being with the intelligence of an adult, more or less, but the emotional maturity of a very young child. He's got a lot of feelings (like any kid) and no experience handling them... but unlike your average toddler, his temper tantrums can be lethal for people around him. That's not to excuse what he does, but it does help put it in context, I think.

[Rater202]

Once must also consider the degree of alienation the creature must feel: His first experiance in life was violent, horrified rejection by his creator.

Imagine that being your first memory: Being told that you are a failure, that you are unworthy, by your parent and, in a way, your God, the being who created you from nothing... Yeah.

Compounding that is that the monster is obviously inhuman in body: His eyes are noted to be a strange color and something about his flesh causes an extreme visceral reaction in others—which, considering that he's covered in stitches, is described as being unnaturally pale, with his muscles and arteries and the movements thereof visible beneath it, scans.

It's not simply that he's oppressed and mistreated, and that's everyone who looks upon him instantly and instinctively rejects him outright.

He's specifically treated as a monster unworthy of life, love, or affection by any and all he meets. And, as noted, he's for all intents and purposes a child.

Keep twlling a kid he's bad, and he'll believe that he's bad and grow up to be bad. Tell a kid he's a monster and what's he gonna grow up to be?

and that's just the stuff that Shelly could reasonably know about. We now know that there are certain forms of learning and certain types of cognitive development that can only occur at certain stages in brain development. If Adam was effectively born as an adult he would be all kinds of screwed in terms of his ability to learn to be a person.

[Bohandas]

Once must also consider the degree of alienation the creature must feel: His first experiance in life was violent, horrified rejection by his creator.

No it wasn't. He specifically makes it clear that his senses weren't working when he first woke up. He only finds out about Victor secondhand as a result of accidentally having some of the pages of Victor's journal

[Rater202]

No it wasn't. He specifically makes it clear that his senses weren't working when he first woke up. He only finds out about Victor secondhand as a result of accidentally having some of the pages of Victor's journal
An infant that is deprived of parental affection is highly likely to develop behavioral disorders due to the alienation as they grow older. The lack of conscious memory of such alienation does not mitigate it, the subconscious memory is all that is needed.

The creature was senseless as a newborn is senseless: The lack of conscious recollection of the rejection is honestly irrelevant, he still experienced it and the memory still exists in his subconscious influencing his development going foreward.

The journal pages would have simply explained why the monster felt as he did, and given him someone to seek out for answers.

[warty goblin]

Mmm. I wasn't a big fan of that one. Aesthetically, it was a bit too fantastic for my S&S tastes (though that's fairly common with Red Sonja), but I also seem tor ecall that she never really did anything - she basically was just working as a bodyguard for another character the whole time.

Yeah, the ending was less heroic than expected. Certaibly dark though, and I'd still rate it as pretty fun S&S. I've got the next five books standing by for the next time I need that itch scratched, and I think they'll do a good job of it.

Anyway, that leaves me with In the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. The gimmick of this book is that it's written over the course of October, one chapter a day. Therefore I'm reading it one chapter a day, which requires some substantial self control as it's excellent. I can see reading this over the course of many Octobers to come.

Also dove into Jeff Vandemeer's recent Hummingbird Salamander, since I felt like something a bit more difficult. It's certainly something, and takes unreliable narrators to a new level; this one isn't so much shading the truth as deliberately obfuscating it as a counter-intelligence measure. Fascinating, and I'm rather curious where it goes.

[Eldan]

Ann Leckie is writing another Radch novel and this one seems to be about Translators. Best news I've had in a long while.

[Bohandas]

I'm halfway through Phantom of the Opera. I must say that none of the adaptations I've seen of it have ever captured how much of a self-centered egomaniac Raoul is in the book. Or the fact that he's almost as much of an obsessive stalker as the Phantom is.

EDIT:
Also, it just occurred to me that Eric's posing as a ghost may have been the prototype for the villains on Scooby Doo

[Scarlet Knight]

I did not get that impression; he is, after all, a 19th century nobleman.

Since you are only halfway through:

The Phantom is a pretty casual murderer where Christine is concerned while Raoul is not. Plus I find it interesting that the screen versions seem to always eliminate the Persian.

[LibraryOgre]

Finished "So You Want to be a Wizard", moved on to "Deep Wizardry"

[Bohandas]

I did not get that impression; he is, after all, a 19th century nobleman.

Since you are only halfway through:

The Phantom is a pretty casual murderer where Christine is concerned while Raoul is not. Plus I find it interesting that the screen versions seem to always eliminate the Persian.

I'm not saying that the phantom is better. I'm just saying that Raoul only looks good because the Phantom is there for contrast. Raoul may be a childish egocentric posessive stalker, but at least he isn't also a serial killer and a gangster on top of it the way Eric is.

[Velaryon]

Went on a graphic novel binge over the weekend. I read both volumes of Stickman Odyssey by Christopher Ford, which was cute and sometimes clever but not amazing. I mean, in terms of humorous stick figure comics, it doesn't even begin to approach OOTS in quality. But it was fun.

I also read The Eternal Smile by Gene Luen Yang, which was pretty decent but definitely not his best work. I enjoyed American Born Chinese, The Shadow Hero, and Dragon Hoops much more.

Started in on the first volume of Lore Olympus as well. Journey's still out on that one for me.

[Tarmor]

Finished "So You Want to be a Wizard", moved on to "Deep Wizardry"

I've got four books in that series... not sure if there are more. [Edit: Just did a check, I'm way behind.] Enjoyed them a lot, and it would be good to re-read them, but there's a long list before I get that far.

I'm most of the way through 'Dust of Dreams' (Stephen Erikson, book 9 of 10, Malazan Book of the Fallen.) I've been reading my way through this steadily all year - had to take a break in the middle while I obtained the last few books I was missing. I've enjoyed the range of characters, locations and conflicts, though with so many people, it gets a little confusing remembering who some of them are and what they were doing in the past.

[KorvinStarmast]

Most recent non fiction: The New Map. (Yergin)
Worth a read, although it being published in 2020 misses a few glaring things in current events.

[Ionathus]

Started in on the first volume of Lore Olympus as well. Journey's still out on that one for me.

I have the print edition of volume one as well. LO is very fun but definitely the most fun on an initial binge through the online archive. It's also worth mentioning that the comic was initially designed to be a single continuous vertical scroll - which can only truly be replicated on a smartphone screen (or a set of handcrafted five-inch-wide and 5-meter-long actual paper scrolls!).

The print copy can't quite deliver that experience the whole time - the artwork is still good, but the "vibes" are off.

[Bohandas]

Has anyone else noticed the similarities between Frankenstein's Monster and the Phantom of the Opera?

[Ionathus]

You mean aside from the monster's heart-wrenchingly beautiful tenor solos?

[Bohandas]

I mean how they were both outcast from society because of their hideous ugliness and they both eventually snapped and became sadistic incel serial killers. And they also both engaged in extortion.

[Ionathus]

I mean how they were both outcast from society because of their hideous ugliness and they both eventually snapped and became sadistic incel serial killers. And they also both engaged in extortion.

Oh sure, that too I guess.

[Wookieetank]

Finished up Needful Things, and had a wild throw down of an ending. Definitely could see where some of the ideas behind Under The Dome came from. Overall found Needful Things to be decent and enjoyable.

Started in on Inhibitor Phase now, by Aalistair Reynolds and just blew through the first 70 pages. Is surprisingly fast paced for this author, but no complaints on that and it still feels very fleshed out. Really looking forward to diving back into it, and mildly bummed Halloween is going to interfere with my reading time.

[warty goblin]

Finished A Night in the Lonesome October last night, as that is the correct time to finish
it. This is the book about Jack the Ripper's talking dog you didn't know you needed in your life. But not now, you have to wait for next October, when the stars are right.

[Bohandas]

Finished A Night in the Lonesome October last night, as that is the correct time to finish
it. This is the book about Jack the Ripper's talking dog you didn't know you needed in your life. But not now, you have to wait for next October, when the stars are right.

Is said dog in any related to the Son of Sam's talking dog?

[dan.meme]

I finished "The Martian" by Andy Weir. . I enjoy science fiction books that are based in reality, and "The Martian" does a great job of presenting a believable scenario:smallsmile:
Did you read The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan?

[Ionathus]

I enjoyed The Martian as well. I read Hatchet a dozen times growing up, and was always into "survival with the following tools" books, plus I love space and irreverent narration, so it hit all my weak points. That said, the writing was fairly one-note throughout the book, and I was much less invested in any of the drama or humor than I was in the fun survivalist MacGyvering. The book was at its best when it was leaning fully into the "Hatchet IN SPAAAAAACE" vibes. Yes I'm aware Castaway is a better comparison but have never seen it

I think it's one of the few books that doesn't just suit a movie adaptation -- it's improved by it. The film version cut out a ton of extra fluff that wasn't needed (looking at you "shorting out Pathfinder to cut him off from Earth again for cheap drama" and "oooh no there's a dust storm he doesn't know about, wait nevermind he caught on and now he's fine"), preserved the most exciting and clever science hacks, and gave us some great acting to sell the dialogue and narration. Matt Damon in particular did a killer job matching and even elevating the book's tone.

Plus, I still find it very fun indeed that The Martian is one of the few popular sci-fi books
where everybody lives.

Fun fact to your "believable" point: I think Weir has said that pretty much everything except the initial dust storm that kick starts the plot is actually grounded in modern (or near-future) science. It really is a feasible story from a science standpoint, which is wild. And the only discrepancy with the dust storm is that Mars's atmosphere is too thin to generate significant force, so it wouldn't have been able to tip the MAV or pick up the equipment that impales Watney.

[The Glyphstone]

I never actually read The Martian, but I did read his 2nd book, Project Hail Mary and thought it was a wonderful depiction of First Contact.

[Ionathus]

I never actually read The Martian, but I did read his 2nd book, Project Hail Mary and thought it was a wonderful depiction of First Contact.

Ooh, I love a good first contact story, I'll have to check it out!

[warty goblin]

Is said dog in any related to the Son of Sam's talking dog?

Nah, the book isn't really about serial killers, it's a very fun riff on lovecraftian and other horror tropes.


Finished Hummingbird Salamander, a book I think I didn't quite get or like as much as I wanted to. It's quite good, but the ending didn't work all that well for me. The prose was good, but that very self conscious sort of good modern prose where you're always aware you're reading Good Prose, and it has lots of weird kinda metaphors that sort of don't make sense if you think about them too long.


Now on to Years of Endurance a memoir by HMS Tiger's doctor covering his time on the shop 1914 - 1916. This is well written without any qualifications, in that sort of very straight forwards but extremely evocative way early/mid 20th century British writers seem to have mastered. If you have an unreasonable fixation on early 20th century warships it's also fascinating, but honestly I'd recommend it even aside from that.

Also started up Cyrion by Tanith Lee, which is pretty clearly a fix-up sword and sorcery novel hammered out of a batch of short stories. I've only read like 10 pages, but this seems to be at about a 70% of Maximally Ornate and Inaccessible Lee, which is about the sweet spot.

[Callos_DeTerran]

So I read my first book in quite a while, decided to go with one that I've had interest in for quite awhile! One quick shop of the internet later and I have a copy of Hour of the Dragon, the only Conan novel written by Robert E. Howard himself! I've read a lot (if not all) of the short stories myself, but never this story!

And to be honest? Its worth it. Something about Howard's writing I just really jive with, the writing is just vivid and feels alive in a way that I've rarely run across before!

As the final story in Conan' life, you honestly don't need to have read any of the others first. It acts as if the reader hasn't read other Conan stories and honestly I quite recommend it to any fans of sword and sorcery or Conan in general.

[Eldan]

I think some kind of enormous crime has been committed. Only about a year ago, I heard about Lois McMaster Bujold for the first time. The woman has six hugos, 3 locus and 2 nebulas, more than Heinlein. And somehow, I never read or book or even heard of them.

Anyway, I'm reading Paladin of Souls, which for some reason I find to be an immensely awkward title. But the book is really good. Direct sequel to The Curse of Chalion, which I also loved, and it has everything that was good about that, too. Living world, well-fleshed out characters, solid prose, nicely subtle, but very present magic, a great focus on a very well realized fantasy religion.

[Ionathus]

I think some kind of enormous crime has been committed. Only about a year ago, I heard about Lois McMaster Bujold for the first time. The woman has six hugos, 3 locus and 2 nebulas, more than Heinlein. And somehow, I never read or book or even heard of them.

Anyway, I'm reading Paladin of Souls, which for some reason I find to be an immensely awkward title. But the book is really good. Direct sequel to The Curse of Chalion, which I also loved, and it has everything that was good about that, too. Living world, well-fleshed out characters, solid prose, nicely subtle, but very present magic, a great focus on a very well realized fantasy religion.

Not terribly surprising unfortunately: it was the same way for me with Ursula K. LeGuin. I finally picked up Left Hand of Darkness two years ago and was completely blown away. Such an imaginative depiction of space travel - I love how the Ekumen's approach to planets saying "what if we don't want to join? What if we kill your messenger??" is just a simple "idk probably wait for you to die and try again in 50 years lol". Actually leaning into the scope of space. Actually truly playing with politics, religion, gender, sexuality...I kept saying to myself "this was written in the Sixties??"

There's loads of excellent woman-written sci-fi and fantasy but it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as the "big" names. Riddle-Master of Hed is a fantasy series that is, again, unlike anything else I've read. Lots of interesting perspectives that I wasn't used to after consuming male-centered stuff.

[Sayeth]

Just finished The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik last night. I didn't really love A Deadly Education, the first book in the trilogy at first. The protagonist, El, is not very likable and Novik has an annoying habit of putting page-long infodumps right in the middle of something exciting happening. It was just interesting enough to keep me reading, and I started liking it around midway through the first book. By the time I finished the third book, I loved El and the world she inhabits. I'm curious to see if Novik comes back to this world at some point. The trilogy ends with a sensible and satisfying conclusion, but there are still some loose ends that could be tied up in a future novel. I have a feeling that she intends to return and write a bit more at some point after a break.

[Morgaln]

I've recently finished "The God Is Not Willing," by Steven Erikson, a follow-up to the Malazan Book of the Fallen. It's very much on par with the main series, and all the references made me want to reread that, so I'm starting on "Gardens of the Moon." I'm a bit anxious about rereading the second book in the series because I remember the ending of that book hitting me hard, but at least this time I'll be forewarned.

[Ionathus]

Currently halfway through the first Mistborn book for the first time! I'm enjoying the magic mechanics and the political subterfuge - the philosophy and emotional beats are a little hamfisted for my tastes though.

Also I can't help giggling everytime they reference the oppression of the "ska."


Just finished The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik last night. I didn't really love A Deadly Education, the first book in the trilogy at first. The protagonist, El, is not very likable and Novik has an annoying habit of putting page-long infodumps right in the middle of something exciting happening. It was just interesting enough to keep me reading, and I started liking it around midway through the first book. By the time I finished the third book, I loved El and the world she inhabits. I'm curious to see if Novik comes back to this world at some point. The trilogy ends with a sensible and satisfying conclusion, but there are still some loose ends that could be tied up in a future novel. I have a feeling that she intends to return and write a bit more at some point after a break.

My partner has said very good things about this series! I'm quite interested in it but think I need to wait a bit longer before I'm ready for magical boarding school trope deconstruction.

[Mechalich]

My partner has said very good things about this series! I'm quite interested in it but think I need to wait a bit longer before I'm ready for magical boarding school trope deconstruction.

I wouldn't really call the Scholomance a trope deconstruction. Many of the tropes, particularly those involving friendship, cliques, and romance are actually played almost completely straight. It's more accurate to call it the grimdark black comedy version of magical boarding school (and in the third book, magical secret societies more generally). Everything is awful, magic is a source of evil in the world, and the numbers absolutely do not add up (human reproduction is not capable of handling a 75+% child mortality rate and the families described in the series do not reflect the kind of relentless breeding effort that would be necessary to even try), but the series most plays this for comedy with protagonist El relentlessly railing at how utterly unfair, especially for her personally since the universe actually is specifically out to get her, all of this is from start to finish with enough manic angst that it is regularly hilarious. El also has very tropey protagonist level powers (insofar as the series is a deconstruction it's that she hates this) and therefore is able to produce actual victories against the grimdarkness of the world in her immediate vicinity.

The appeal of the series depends almost entirely on whether or not the read finds El's ranting, raving, and general commentary on the absurdity of everything fun and/or funny.

[BloodSquirrel]

I wouldn't really call the Scholomance a trope deconstruction. Many of the tropes, particularly those involving friendship, cliques, and romance are actually played almost completely straight. It's more accurate to call it the grimdark black comedy version of magical boarding school (and in the third book, magical secret societies more generally). Everything is awful, magic is a source of evil in the world, and the numbers absolutely do not add up (human reproduction is not capable of handling a 75+% child mortality rate and the families described in the series do not reflect the kind of relentless breeding effort that would be necessary to even try), but the series most plays this for comedy with protagonist El relentlessly railing at how utterly unfair, especially for her personally since the universe actually is specifically out to get her, all of this is from start to finish with enough manic angst that it is regularly hilarious. El also has very tropey protagonist level powers (insofar as the series is a deconstruction it's that she hates this) and therefore is able to produce actual victories against the grimdarkness of the world in her immediate vicinity.

The appeal of the series depends almost entirely on whether or not the read finds El's ranting, raving, and general commentary on the absurdity of everything fun and/or funny.

A 75% mortality rate is not far off from some real societies, and wizards age more slowly (plus, having access to both magic and modern living standards makes having children much safer).

I wouldn't really even call the series grimdark, though. It's got some grim elements to it, but most of the really hard edges are smoothed off and the worst stuff is talked about rather than being shown. Even more than most 1st-person narratives, the books are mostly stuck inside of El's head, and El is only a mildly-cynical heroine at worst. It's also laden with exposition and info dumps, which are done with a decent amount of personality, but does leave the series a little weak in the plot department.

A fun series overall, but not particularly heady or anything.

[ecarden]

A 75% mortality rate is not far off from some real societies, and wizards age more slowly (plus, having access to both magic and modern living standards makes having children much safer).

I can't speak to the later portion of this, but the former seems fairly unlikely. Note that this means an average of eight children to reach replacement value. What little evidence I can find suggests a range, but is probably around a 50% pre-adult death rate. Which makes sense, as with a 75% death rate, you'd need eight kids just to reach replacement rate and, assuming the series is focused on young adults and the risk doesn't suddenly disappear if you graduate, this gets even worse demographically.

[Mechalich]

I can't speak to the later portion of this, but the former seems fairly unlikely. Note that this means an average of eight children to reach replacement value. What little evidence I can find suggests a range, but is probably around a 50% pre-adult death rate. Which makes sense, as with a 75% death rate, you'd need eight kids just to reach replacement rate and, assuming the series is focused on young adults and the risk doesn't suddenly disappear if you graduate, this gets even worse demographically.

The fundamental issue isn't just the rates themselves, but that the societies reflected in the series don't reflect anything like the kind of systems that would develop with such an extraordinarily high pre-adult death rate, nor do the characters reflect this. For example, literally everyone in the series, except El who is special, should have had at least one sibling eaten by monsters prior to even enrolling in the Scholomance, but this simply is not the case. The world, fundamentally, doesn't hold together.

Which, by the way, is fine, it's not the point of the series, which is about the struggle to take hard path to do things the right way rather than taking shortcuts and doing things the wrong way because that, ultimately, just makes things worse in the end. In order to reinforce this it exaggerates the circumstances to comedic levels.

[warty goblin]

I wouldn't really call the Scholomance a trope deconstruction. Many of the tropes, particularly those involving friendship, cliques, and romance are actually played almost completely straight. It's more accurate to call it the grimdark black comedy version of magical boarding school (and in the third book, magical secret societies more generally). Everything is awful, magic is a source of evil in the world, and the numbers absolutely do not add up (human reproduction is not capable of handling a 75+% child mortality rate and the families described in the series do not reflect the kind of relentless breeding effort that would be necessary to even try), but the series most plays this for comedy with protagonist El relentlessly railing at how utterly unfair, especially for her personally since the universe actually is specifically out to get her, all of this is from start to finish with enough manic angst that it is regularly hilarious. El also has very tropey protagonist level powers (insofar as the series is a deconstruction it's that she hates this) and therefore is able to produce actual victories against the grimdarkness of the world in her immediate vicinity.


I wouldn't say magic is a force of evil in the world. Rather I think magic functions as, more or less, the excess value created by human labor, and the hordes of monsters wanting eat everybody's kids are just an extremely in your face representation of a sort of harm that collectively everybody creates in a sort of difuse way, but gets suffered by specific people.

The bad stuff comes about due to human laziness, greed and competition. If nobody pulled malia, there would be no mals eating kids and no problem. But people do that because it's easy power and people are lazy, greedy, and competitive. So of course you do what you can to keep your kids safe, but that's at best a zero sum game, and the instant you use malia to do that it's distinctly negative sum. But it's negative sum where hopefully somebody else gets digested.

The bleakness in the series isn't due to the world being inherently vile. It's that it looks at people and goes yep, we will 100% condemn other people's children to torturous death not just for our immediate safety, or our family's safety, but so that we can have a big ass cool house.

[The Glyphstone]

The last book kinda beats you over the head with that moral, actually, with the whole maw-mouth thing. You can build yourself and your family a shelter from monsters, all it costs you is one human sacrifice and condemning an unknown number of strangers to an eternity of hellish agony.

[warty goblin]

The last book kinda beats you over the head with that moral, actually, with the whole maw-mouth thing. You can build yourself and your family a shelter from monsters, all it costs you is one human sacrifice and condemning an unknown number of strangers to an eternity of hellish agony.

Or rather that's the cheap (to you) and easy approach that lets you build a really ace house. The alternative takes a lot of work, and is substantially more cramped. But, you know, not built on literal human sacrifice.

Which is the really bleak argument the book is making. People forgot how to do that because it was just too much bother compared to eternally torturing people. Just so long as you don't really have to know or talk about it.

[Mechalich]

Or rather that's the cheap (to you) and easy approach that lets you build a really ace house. The alternative takes a lot of work, and is substantially more cramped. But, you know, not built on literal human sacrifice.

Which is the really bleak argument the book is making. People forgot how to do that because it was just too much bother compared to eternally torturing people. Just so long as you don't really have to know or talk about it.

It's not that the forgot how to do it because it was too much of a bother, it's because they literally couldn't do it. The spells to make a Golden Enclave take more power than any wizard possesses. El can do it, because she's a 'third-class entity' she's two full orders of magnitude (one hundred times) more powerful than everyone else, but it's completely impossible for others. The final book tosses out, at the very end, that one of her friends uncovered a way to circle magic a solution if everyone was pure mana and that's is a new and massively important world-changing discovery, but by that point the series is over.


I wouldn't say magic is a force of evil in the world. Rather I think magic functions as, more or less, the excess value created by human labor, and the hordes of monsters wanting eat everybody's kids are just an extremely in your face representation of a sort of harm that collectively everybody creates in a sort of difuse way, but gets suffered by specific people.

The bad stuff comes about due to human laziness, greed and competition. If nobody pulled malia, there would be no mals eating kids and no problem. But people do that because it's easy power and people are lazy, greedy, and competitive. So of course you do what you can to keep your kids safe, but that's at best a zero sum game, and the instant you use malia to do that it's distinctly negative sum. But it's negative sum where hopefully somebody else gets digested.

The reason I said magic is a force for evil in the Scholomance is that it doesn't do anything good, or special, or make the world better at all. It's a source of power wizards play with, but their lives are terrible and the 99.9% of everyone else ignores them completely. The best thing that could happen would be for everyone to simply forget magic entirely, their lives would all suddenly improve immensely.


Ultimately, the Scholomance simply doesn't have good world-building. None of Novik's books do, it's clearly not an area of focus for her. For the most part, that's perfectly fine, since she's writing dark twisted fairy tales where the world-building doesn't need to make sense for the story to work (it's a much bigger problem in Temeraire, one of the reasons I never got very far in that series).

[BloodSquirrel]

It's not that the forgot how to do it because it was too much of a bother, it's because they literally couldn't do it. The spells to make a Golden Enclave take more power than any wizard possesses. El can do it, because she's a 'third-class entity' she's two full orders of magnitude (one hundred times) more powerful than everyone else, but it's completely impossible for others. The final book tosses out, at the very end, that one of her friends uncovered a way to circle magic a solution if everyone was pure mana and that's is a new and massively important world-changing discovery, but by that point the series is over.


Yeah, this is one of the things that stops the book from being more substantial than it could be. The "good" solution takes an order of magnitude less mana, so even if the enclaves it creates aren't as large, they could easily create more of them. There isn't even a real trade-off there. It's just a (literally) magic solution that falls into their lap.

Granted, you could write an entire book about the consequences of the former system being replaced and the power dynamics involved as the established enclaves resist it because it threatens their power base, but this book is nowhere close to doing that.



Ultimately, the Scholomance simply doesn't have good world-building. None of Novik's books do, it's clearly not an area of focus for her. For the most part, that's perfectly fine, since she's writing dark twisted fairy tales where the world-building doesn't need to make sense for the story to work (it's a much bigger problem in Temeraire, one of the reasons I never got very far in that series).

Everyone can't just forget magic, because the malia are still out there and will come after them whether they use magic or not. Even if everyone stopped altogether right now, the existing maw-mouths wouldn't just vanish.

I think the world-building is fine- in fact it's one of the book's strengths. What Novik's books lack is a strong plot structure. She sets up an interesting and imaginative problem, with a lot of rich detail going into it. But both this series and Temeraire are 90% exposition and meandering character scenes. Scholomance does a great job of establishing the long-term conflict, but doesn't know how to put together a web of intermediate conflicts that give the story a strong arc and move it forward. Plot points are just kind of thrown out there to give the characters something to do until a solution for the finale drops into their laps.

Almost all of the world, politics, and character dynamics are described to us much more than they are embodied in the events we see. Antagonists only really show up as occasional, immediate threats, not as people actively working against the protagonists across the whole story. Novik is good at building her world, but she isn't very good at showing it in action.

[warty goblin]

So many books, so little time to type about them. Currently reading:

At War, At Sea, which is a history of 20th century naval combat, primarily focused on how sailers were trained, lived and fought. This makes it rather unusual for a naval history, as the field loves to count rivets and obsess over minute details of ship design, things which this book kind of just skims through. It's quite well written, and the bibliography has been a real goldmine. There's the inevitable English language/winner's bias, so the stuff on the Royal, Canadian and US navies are much better sourced, and therefore much more detailed, than the German or Japanese, but if you read this sort of stuff you're used to that.

The Unicorn Creed, by Elizabeth Scarborough. This is a fantasy novel alright. It continually teeters on the precipice of boring me enough to give up on it, but avoids going over the edge. There's some potentially interesting stuff in the background about, like, conflict between human and natural/magical forces, but the book has zero interest in leaning into a anything that heavy. Or really anything at all. It's basically the Marvel movie of fantasy, not actually challenging or thought provoking or, you know, good, but also not properly trashy and bad and full of dumb sex and violence and other cool but stupid stuff. It's just a safe, vaguely enjoyable, competently executed and painfully middle of the road thing. Which is, in some ways, the worst sort of thing.

And my girlfriend got me a really lovely edition of the Silmarillion for Christmas, so that's gonna grab me like a giant octopus.

[Sermil]

Finished Her Majesty's Royal Coven after seeing it on some best-of-year lists. Good in parts but I found myself spending more time arguing with the book than anything else.

The setting is "our" England, modern day (supposedly 2022, though it feels like pre-COVID 2019). There's a small group of government-sanctioned witches, the titular Her Majesty's Royal Coven, kept secret from us mundanes. Unlike Harry Potter, though, there's no separate "wizarding world" -- the witches live in London and various English towns, go out to pubs and Chinese restaurants, drive normal cars, talk on cell phones, etc. Modern English concerns, like racism, feminism, and LGBT issues, are important parts of the story. The center of the story are five witches who grew up and trained together, who used to be close friends, but have drifted apart and had some arguments.

The parts where the friends are together are good, and much of the background is good, but...


The story follows into the big fantasy trap of "the end of the world is coming! Everyone will die if we don't XYZ!". I don't know why so many fantasy stories insist on making the stakes "succeed or the entire world dies!" (OK, I do know - it's a hangover from Tolkien). But it always makes everything else seem small and unimportant. It also has the annoying tendency to flatten all moral dilemmas into tactical ones -- it's not a hard trolley problem when one track is "literally the end of the world" (again, think of Tolkien -- Frodo never had to make any moral decisions during the quest. The one "moral" decision, keeping Gollum alive, ended up being shown as a good decision because it worked, because Gollum helped get the ring the fire.) Yes, racing to avert the apocalypse can be exciting, but it's not good if you want to show characters going around their day-to-day lives and dealing (magically) with the normal fights and struggles that brings. It overshadows everything else.
The actions of the main villain make no sense. Not logically and not emotionally. This is tied into the first point -- most of her actions would have made sense if the world wasn't about to end. Emotionally, at least. The main villain is a jerk, yes, but the problem is, the end-of-the-world stuff overshadows her jerkness and actually almost justifies the very thing the author clearly wants us to hate her for. And when it doesn't, her actions just make no sense at all based on what she knows at that point. I'm thinking specifically of, first, Helena asking the warlocks to kidnap Theo once she discovers Theo is trans. If Theo really is the Sullied Child and is going to summon Leviathan, what exactly did she think the warlocks were going to do about it? If there wasn't the whole Sullied Child prophecy, then it would have been a perfect standard transphobe-jerk move; trying to force a trans-person back into their assigned-at-birth gender. But in the context of end-of-the-world, it just made no sense at all. And secondly, Helena summoning Belial the Master, when she could -- and did -- use the scary dream-prophecy to could convince her strike team to join her in trying to kill Theo. She knew first hand how dangerous the demon was. She knew she could easily get 10 or even 20 witches together by showing them the dream and have them overwhelm Niamh and kill Theo. It didn't feel like her back was up against the wall enough to do a desperation move like summoning Belial. And, as I said -- if Theo really was going to be responsible for Leviathan arising, there's some argument for killing her. Even if she's totally innocent and sweet, maybe she's just fated to have a bad dream and mumble the exact summoning worlds. It actually lets Helena off the hook; rather than being a transphobic jerk, she's trying to save the world the best she can. She's an idiot (the prophecies are clearly lures to get her to do exactly what she did), but she's not trying to kill Theo because she's a transphobe any more. Or not just because. It lets her off the hook. Again and again, it felt like the villain did things because the plot required it than because she had a real reason to.


Anyways, not bad and I'll probably pick up the second at some point, but boy did I wish I could go back in time and suggest to the author "please don't make the story about trying to avert the apocalypse"

[Mechalich]

The story follows into the big fantasy trap of "the end of the world is coming! Everyone will die if we don't XYZ!". I don't know why so many fantasy stories insist on making the stakes "succeed or the entire world dies!" (OK, I do know - it's a hangover from Tolkien).

It's not really a holdover from Tolkien, but more an issue of scale and stakes and how they interact with human psychology. Human's mental systems are designed to apply to relatively small social groupings of no more than a few hundred people. Any event that involves more people than that struggles to scale effectively and becomes some nebulous 'really bad thing' unless it impacts you personally. This means that a framework based around 'we must stop Villain A from doing X horrible thing or 10,000 random people we've never met will die' has very little weight. Consider, for example, the effort to save the various people in the city at the end of Justice League (the movie), no one in the audience cares about those people and saving them is only relevant insofar as it reveals aspects of the characters in question.

And this generally holds as well even if the scale and stakes are upped to national scale - if the audience doesn't care about said nation, its potential obliteration may not resonate with the audience. For example, I'm a fan of the Aubrey/Maturin Napoleanic Wars novels, but characters in those have an ironclad belief that the English must triumph over Napolean and that their cause is absolutely just and righteous and while this is perfectly in character for people living at the time it still feels kind of strange to read. In a series that is set in a version of the real world, this can be a big problem.

By contrast, everyone lives on Earth, so blowing up Earth is guaranteed to matter to the entire audience. We can actually see the extension of this in space opera. Notably, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens are bunch of completely random planets get blown up and...no one in the audience cares because none of the characters are from those planets.

Now, Tolkien certainly represents an example of this in action. The Hobbits are from the Shire, which is about as far from the frontlines as it is physically possible to be. Therefore, in order to actively threaten the Shire, and thereby emotionally resonate with the leads, the conflict to come has to threaten everything. There's also the notable example in the Two Towers where Merry and Pippin, and by extension the audience, come to care about the despoiling of Fangorn Forest, and this is a good example of the quantity of words it takes to do this. 'Hijack a nuclear device and hold the world for ransom' - thanks Dr. Evil, is cliche, but it is instantly understandable.

[LaZodiac]

It's not really a holdover from Tolkien, but more an issue of scale and stakes and how they interact with human psychology. Human's mental systems are designed to apply to relatively small social groupings of no more than a few hundred people. Any event that involves more people than that struggles to scale effectively and becomes some nebulous 'really bad thing' unless it impacts you personally. This means that a framework based around 'we must stop Villain A from doing X horrible thing or 10,000 random people we've never met will die' has very little weight. Consider, for example, the effort to save the various people in the city at the end of Justice League (the movie), no one in the audience cares about those people and saving them is only relevant insofar as it reveals aspects of the characters in question.

And this generally holds as well even if the scale and stakes are upped to national scale - if the audience doesn't care about said nation, its potential obliteration may not resonate with the audience. For example, I'm a fan of the Aubrey/Maturin Napoleanic Wars novels, but characters in those have an ironclad belief that the English must triumph over Napolean and that their cause is absolutely just and righteous and while this is perfectly in character for people living at the time it still feels kind of strange to read. In a series that is set in a version of the real world, this can be a big problem.

By contrast, everyone lives on Earth, so blowing up Earth is guaranteed to matter to the entire audience. We can actually see the extension of this in space opera. Notably, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens are bunch of completely random planets get blown up and...no one in the audience cares because none of the characters are from those planets.

Now, Tolkien certainly represents an example of this in action. The Hobbits are from the Shire, which is about as far from the frontlines as it is physically possible to be. Therefore, in order to actively threaten the Shire, and thereby emotionally resonate with the leads, the conflict to come has to threaten everything. There's also the notable example in the Two Towers where Merry and Pippin, and by extension the audience, come to care about the despoiling of Fangorn Forest, and this is a good example of the quantity of words it takes to do this. 'Hijack a nuclear device and hold the world for ransom' - thanks Dr. Evil, is cliche, but it is instantly understandable.

Eh, I cared that the planetary alliance got blasted. It's not as impactful as Alderan, but still.

Also, hilariously, in the novels the Shire does also get attacked directly in a very blunt and kinda unnecessary addition (that yes did help support the themes the story was getting at, but really just wasn't needed). So while it's true LOTR has the "this is a clear world threat so it matters to you, person safe in England The Shire, even if the Big War doesn't show up directly at your doorstep" vibe, it does also very much have the Big War end up directly on their doorstep.

[Sermil]

It's not really a holdover from Tolkien, but more an issue of scale and stakes and how they interact with human psychology. Human's mental systems are designed to apply to relatively small social groupings of no more than a few hundred people. Any event that involves more people than that struggles to scale effectively and becomes some nebulous 'really bad thing' unless it impacts you personally. This means that a framework based around 'we must stop Villain A from doing X horrible thing or 10,000 random people we've never met will die' has very little weight. Consider, for example, the effort to save the various people in the city at the end of Justice League (the movie), no one in the audience cares about those people and saving them is only relevant insofar as it reveals aspects of the characters in question.

And this generally holds as well even if the scale and stakes are upped to national scale - if the audience doesn't care about said nation, its potential obliteration may not resonate with the audience. For example, I'm a fan of the Aubrey/Maturin Napoleanic Wars novels, but characters in those have an ironclad belief that the English must triumph over Napolean and that their cause is absolutely just and righteous and while this is perfectly in character for people living at the time it still feels kind of strange to read. In a series that is set in a version of the real world, this can be a big problem.

By contrast, everyone lives on Earth, so blowing up Earth is guaranteed to matter to the entire audience. We can actually see the extension of this in space opera. Notably, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens are bunch of completely random planets get blown up and...no one in the audience cares because none of the characters are from those planets.

Now, Tolkien certainly represents an example of this in action. The Hobbits are from the Shire, which is about as far from the frontlines as it is physically possible to be. Therefore, in order to actively threaten the Shire, and thereby emotionally resonate with the leads, the conflict to come has to threaten everything. There's also the notable example in the Two Towers where Merry and Pippin, and by extension the audience, come to care about the despoiling of Fangorn Forest, and this is a good example of the quantity of words it takes to do this. 'Hijack a nuclear device and hold the world for ransom' - thanks Dr. Evil, is cliche, but it is instantly understandable.

Exactly, it makes the stakes really high - but my point is "our lives, everyone's lives, are at stake!" makes the stakes too high for a lot of other things. It hard to care about teen angst or old friendship hurts or
transphobia when the stakes are that big. And I think most of the time, I get the impression that HMRC's author is more interested in those human-scale stakes, but the high stakes makes it hard to care. Or makes the characters who do care seem silly.

If you write the characters well, you don't need everyone-dies level stakes. We worry about people we know. If you have a person you care about because you've been reading about them and living in their head for the last hundred pages, putting that person in danger is plenty of worry. Heck, you don't even need anyone-dies level stakes. Look at the Wayfarers series; most of the time, no one is danger, and half the time they are, it's more a medical emergency than a fight. That gives you a lot more freedom to paint a picture of people living actually lives, not just running from one crisis to another.

(It also, paradoxically, ups the stakes if a single person is in danger. Everyone knows the book isn't going to end with the destruction of the world unless it's a really dark fantasy, but authors do kill off individual characters all the time. Going back to Wayfarers, I genuinely didn't know if Tupo was going to survive xyr accidental poisoning, whereas I'm not actually worried that the world will end at the end of the HMRC series.)

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I never actually read The Martian, but I did read his 2nd book, Project Hail Mary and thought it was a wonderful depiction of First Contact.

*Third. Second was Artemis, a book set in an established but somewhat struggling moon colony, where the main character, a small-scale smuggler, gets in over her head when she lets her greed overcome her better sense and signs up for a sabotage mission.

I started reading The Martian myself back when Weir was a webcomic author, and started posting chapters on his forums, but I decided to wait until he had put the whole thing together so I could read it in one go. Which I find somewhat ironic, since now I'm reading Pale Lights (https://palelights.com) (the new novel by the author of A Practical Guide to Evil (https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com)) one chapter a week.

Grey Wolf

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Just finished The Path of Thorns and Be The Serpent (the latest October Daye book).

Path of Thorns is a fairly cynical look at a broken family in medieval fantasy land. Doesn't quite shy into being actively bleak, though; sure she can't fix her awful relatives, but the main character is eventually able to find her own path, and there is hope for the next generation because of her actions.

Be the Serpent is impossible to talk about without major spoilers for both itself and the earlier books in the series. I do highly recommend the October Daye series, though. If you like Urban Fantasy detective stories with a lot of snark, a la The Dresden Files or Mercy Thompson, you'll probably like these as well (though the first book was the author's debut novel IIRC, and is definitely rougher around the edges than the later books).

[theangelJean]

I just read Danger Music by Eddie Ayres. It's a memoir of the year the author spent in Afghanistan teaching at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, his experiences as Emma Ayres in that country in 2015-16 (he was AFAB), the path that led him there and the way that experience helped him realise he could no longer keep living as Emma.

It's entertaining as an account of teaching cello, viola and music theory to kids who had so much going on in their lives, and as an memoir of life as a foreign woman in Afghanistan. It narrowly avoids the "white woman saviour" story, by virtue of the writer realising that the school cannot save anyone, that the author personally will never understand Afghanistan, and that continuing to live as a woman was impossible, inside or outside Afghanistan, due to the author's gender dysphoria. The book is at its best as a record of the many individual stories of the people the author met, taught and loved. I'm relieved it didn't end up with a cliche as its central thesis, and quite happy to have read it as a memoir.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by theangelJean
I'm relieved it didn't end up with a cliche as its central thesis….

What would you have considered a cliché in this context?

[theangelJean]

What would you have considered a cliché in this context?

The "white woman saviour" complex I mentioned earlier.

-This bit edited out in case it stepped over the no-politics line.-

One last thing I forgot to mention was the very British use of creatively-placed profanity, especially to punctuate just how ****ed some situations can be. As an Australian I have a special appreciation for profanity-as-humour, ymmv.

[warty goblin]

I thought I'd do a bit of end-of-year book reflection, organized as a sort of list, as is internet tradition:

Most Pleasant Surprise (fiction)
Joint award to the Scholomance series. I did not think much of A Deadly Education when I first read it, but a call from the local bookstore asking if I wanted to pre-order The Golden Enclaves got me to reread and re evaluate the entire series. While I don't think it's a complex masterpiece for the ages, it is rich, fun, and deeper than I had thought. Well worth reading.

Most pleasant surprise (non-fiction)
Years of Endurance. A memoir by the chief medical officer of HMS Tiger from 2914 through 1916. Really excellently written in that understated fashion you find in early 20th century British prose. It isn't very useful as history - memoirs generally aren't - but it's an excellent look at actually living on board a battlecruiser. Not surprisingly, living on a battlecruiser is wretched and boring and also somehow grand. Mostly this was a surprise because it popped up in my Amazon recommendations, and I've never seen it referenced anywhere.

Most Interesting (Fiction)
Without a doubt this goes to Blood of Roses, by Tanith Lee. Arguably this is in fact a complex masterpiece for the ages, albeit sadly one very few people will actually read, even if they pick it up. This book is a relentlessly difficult read, the plot is bizarre, difficult to summarize, and on first exposure makes absolutely no sense, as in you didn't understand why anything happened, or even what happened. Then the book goes back in time and tells you a bunch of obtuse backstory to the plot you don't understand. This also makes no sense, as you need the next section, which goes back even further and gives you backstory for the backstory. And understanding the plot isn't even half the battle, because the text is so deeply symbolic and metaphorical you need to figure out what the hell everything actually means. Or could mean. Lee gives you an immense amount of interpretive freedom, so like the best abstract and symbolic works, you can use it as a sounding board or interpretive device for your own thinking. Highly recommended, so long ad you are ready to work, and prepared for some really dark content. Like super, super dark.

Most Interesting (nonfiction)
At War, At Sea, a history of, roughly speaking, the evolution of the demands on sailers over the 20th century. This is a bit of a cheat, since I haven't finished it yet, but it's really good and the bibliography has gotten me a whole pile of additional books. Naval history is often deeply obsessed with technology (if you want a catfight, just ask about the relative merits of British 12 inch vs. German 11 inch guns) but this book is extremely uninterested in that. Rather the focus is on how the Navy was perceived, how it was trained, how it fought and what the experience of fighting was like and how it changed with time.

Best Reread
Dragonlance Legends. There's always a bit of trepidation going back to a beloved book after a lot of years, but this held up better than I was afraid it would. For all that it looks like the most cliche fantasy possible, Dragonlance strikes me as frequently weird and daring. This series in particular does a lot of strange things, and is willing to focus on really flawed people with both affection and honesty.

Better than it had any right to be
Dragonlance: Dragons of Deceit. Look, this should be just a lazy nostalgia trip, and I would have been happy with that. Recontextualing arguably the biggest moment in the original Dragonlance trilogy was not in the cards, to say nothing of strongly hinting at massive timeline changes to come. That it does all this mostly successfully, and in classic Weis & Hickman style, is something I am very grateful for.

Exactly as good as it should be
Book of Shadows, by Holly Black. I want to start by saying this is fine. Its also, from theme to plot, unsurprising to the last molecule. Its got a magic system complete with official and slang words for stuff so the world feels Lived In, the protagonist is Complicated and Flawed but not in ways that matter, it's About Trauma and also Inequality, it has a Big Plot Twist that you will see coming from Mars, and standard modern prose which is just fine but also passes through the brain like a linguistic neutrino. This is exactly what you think it will be when you pick it up, and that's fine.

Also Holly Black edited Cassandra Claire's pornographic Rin/Ginny incest fic back in the day. This is completely irrelevant to the text, and also the most interesting thing about it. And - say it with me - that's fine. Not the Ron/Ginny porno fiction, that's disgusting trash and more power to it, but the book. Is fine.

So what stood out to you this year?

[Eldan]

Dammit, you make me want to read Lee again. You had me at incomprehensible, but my too read pile is too big right now.

[warty goblin]

Dammit, you make me want to read Lee again. You had me at incomprehensible, but my too read pile is too big right now.

Dooo iiit. Blood of Roses is excellent, even for Lee. I found it slightly harder than the Blood Opera sequence, but I'd rate it slightly higher. Think roughly the level of incomprehensible as some of the Secret Books of Paradys, but for a 600 page novel rather than linked short stories. It's a really masterful piece of fantasy, although fantasy isn't quite the right description. Maybe novel about a middle ages that didn't exist? Like there's magical things (kind of) but the tone and scope and project is entirely distinct from pretty much anything I'd think of as fantasy.

Also Blood of Roses is actually in print again. The whole thing thing can be yours for like $50, which given that the first printing goes for like $300 is a total bargain.

[Ionathus]

Ooh, year end review? I'm game!

Thunderhead and The Toll by Neal Shusterman's (the Scythe series)

I'd read book 1 in December 2021 and wrapped up the last two in the new year. The ideas and worldbuilding in it kept me going but I was ready to be done. It played with a lot of very fun concepts, but ultimately most of the characters and plot threads were quite stale and went nowhere. The end of the 2nd book set up some crazy opportunities for storytelling but the 3rd book went nowhere. All of the drama hinged on everyone in the room being ignorant, gullible, complacent morons. I got sick of reading the villain's "evil genius" plans being praised as a credible threat when there were 5 ignored solutions to every dire situation.

Points for an attempt at nonbinary inclusion in the 3rd book, but the execution was clunky and I felt like the character didn't get to shine much (though nobody really got to shine in that trainwreck of a 3rd book)

Sounds like it's being optioned for a movie series. I'm honestly excited - it's fertile ground for adaptation, though I hope they don't try to target YA audiences with it since the main theme of the book (murder, i.e. deliberately killing people to death (https://youtu.be/U6cake3bwnY)) would have to be at least somewhat censored and would take away from the impact it has in the books.

Once Upon a Crime by Dawn Stewardson
I lost my group's fantasy league and had to read a Harlequin romance/crime thriller. It was the most mediocre book I've ever read. It wasn't even entertainingly bad or naughty or anything - just totally mediocre. A lot of emotional weight was wrung out of "will she still love me after I've spent all those long years in jail for a crime I didn't commit?" and then they get together on day 2 out of prison. Whatever, sure.

Avatar: Rise of Kyoshi and Avatar: Shadow of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee
Very fun! If you liked Avatar and Korra, these are worth a read. They do a great job of building on the world of Avatar without wallowing in it, and telling their own unique story. Kyoshi is a very compelling character. I was worried that the bending and the combat wouldn't translate to prose, but I honestly think it's even more evocative here than in the graphic novels (The Promise, The Search, etc). The storytelling is a little formulaic and the 2nd one took awhile to get going, but overall I still recommend these to any Avatar fan. They're quick, fun reads.

The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir
I've made my love for this series quite plain on here and I stand by it. I struggled with the first 1/3 of Gideon the Ninth but once I got into it, I was in love with the series. It's one of those stories that I really can't compare to anything else, and I think everyone should at least give it a try. It has the tagline "lesbian necromancers in space" but that's really just a blurb for the cover (the author didn't write that line and doesn't think of it that way).

A lot of complex themes and character arcs, a lot of depth I didn't expect from what sounds like a very pulpy premise. I truly do recommend this series to everyone - but you'll definitely know by the end of the 1st book if it's worth continuing for you.

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
A friend recommended this one after we had a conversation about fantasy magic systems and worldbuilding. I found it worth reading, I'm still thinking about it and will probably read the second one. However, I did basically text the friend every week or so with commentary, and very little of it was positive. The storytelling doesn't really grab me and the themes are very shallow, but Sanderson seemingly compensated for this by repeating them over and over and over. I can't count the number of times Vin thought about her brother and how he'd betrayed her, or the number of times she recalled that she used to not wear dresses, but now she does (gasp!). Felt very repetitive and like I was just waiting for things to happen.

The oppression of the skaa was also too far into the "misery porn" realm for me. I recognize that truly horrendous and sadistic people exist even in the real world, but the story's fixation on that cruelty sucked me right out - at one point, I was questioning how it would be physically possible to enact this cruelty without society grinding to a halt - at a certain point, the nobility is expending all their effort just to torture the skaa with seemingly no advantage. If there's a bigger picture here or a secret to be revealed in later books, then I'm not impressed with how long it's taking to show up.

Also also, I listened to it on audiobook and the actor pronounces it as "ska", identical to the music genre, so I just couldn't ever take the situation 100% seriously. You wrote this in 2006, Sanderson, you're telling me you weren't aware of the similarity? :smallbiggrin:

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Still reading this first book of the series, am very close to the end. Le Guin's prose is maybe my favorite in the world. It took me a while to shift my brain back into "High Fantasy" language, but I am entranced by this story and by the language it uses. Le Guin was a genius. She deserved every accolade she won, and many that she was passed over for.

[warty goblin]

The reading marches on.

Finished At War, At Sea. Overall very good, wish he had spent more time talking about the Falklands.

For fiction I'm now on to Northern Captives, a history of a Barbary Corsair slave raid on Iceland in the 1620s. This is quite interesting, not just because the specific incident is so bizarre, but as a look at a large and long lasting slave trade that, at least in the US, is completely ignored. Also makes me realize o know basically nothing about the 1600s.

Fiction wise I read something called A Touch of Darkness, a Hades and Persephone romance novel. This was pretty bad; dull prose, mostly lacking in plot, structure, conflict, or anything but a lot of sex. I got it for trashy fun, and only finished because I could read it stupidly fadt without thinking.

Am now reading Prospero's Children by Jan Siegal, which I grabbed at a used book store because it has an awesome cover. This is good, actually quite good. The prose is solid enough, and the author is quite adept at manipulating tone (particularly dread and unreality), and sketching in characters well enough to be clear, but vaguely enough to allow room for your imagination. It also moves at a good pace, tends to just tell you stuff you could probably guess rather than dragging it out for pages of tedious "mystery". I particularly like the dreamlike sense of the world opening up and fraying at the edges, with things hinted at and evoked.

[Bohandas]

Rereading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Even though Deep Thought says he double checked his work, and even though the author confirmed that the number was chosen at random, I still can't help but feel that Deep Thought accidentally left off a zero. If the decimal point were moved one place to the right, the Answer would be intelligible and its meaning entirely clear.

[Rynjin]

It truly would have blazed a trail into our brightest future if he had.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Ogre: Come on guys. Don't make me put on my mod hat and weed out this thread.

(No one's crossed the line, yet, but tread carefully.

[Rynjin]

I had such a good pun to make in response, but I won't push my luck. =p

[KorvinStarmast]

I just picked up a couple of used books, Jim Butcher, Harry Dresden stories.
Just began Death Masks. Not the first story, and I wonder if it's better to read them in release order or does each one stand alone well enough? I read a lot of private eye fiction growing up, so the voice/style is easy for me to fall into.

I also like that magic is both dangerous and powerful, and has drawbacks.

[The Glyphstone]

Reading them in order will introduce you to various characters and establish key elements of the setting that grow in importance later. So its not required but can be helpful - Butcher likes recurring characters and call-backs.

Death Masks is book 5 - the 1st free (Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril) are generally considered to be rather clichéd story-wise and primarily worth reading for the worldbuilding.

[Ionathus]

Started book 2 of Mistborn. Still not sure if I'll finish it but the friend who suggested it ("recommended" is too strong a word) said that the 2nd one is where things go completely off the rails in an either hilarious or infuriating way, so I'm looking forward to watching the fireworks.

For right now though, I'm just slogging through the opening 5 chapters from an author who thinks he has to recap everything down to the most basic worldbuilding at the start of his sequel. Loads of clunky asides and weird tangents just to clarify who everybody is and how they can use their superpowers. Has anyone actually ever picked up the 2nd book of a series and gotten mad that they didn't re-explain all the stuff from the first entry?

[Taevyr]

I just picked up a couple of used books, Jim Butcher, Harry Dresden stories.
Just began Death Masks. Not the first story, and I wonder if it's better to read them in release order or does each one stand alone well enough? I read a lot of private eye fiction growing up, so the voice/style is easy for me to fall into.

I also like that magic is both dangerous and powerful, and has drawbacks.

You'll miss out on some worldbuilding, but Butcher writes them in a way that (until a certain point) you should be able to follow the core story of the book wherever you start: personally, I'd recommend starting at either book 3 or 7, as 3 is where he first starts building the foundations of an overarching storyline, and 7 was deliberately written in a way that anyone could jump in. Five's decent enough for a start.

[Rynjin]

I would definitely recommend reading the first three, as they're still solid books (even if they are weaker in general than the rest of the series). However, I'd say Book 4 (Summer Knight) is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL reading going forward, and would highly suggest backing up to at least read 4. Summer Knight is probably the most "lore critical" of the first 8 books, with 5 being a close second.

Starting with book 3 is a bit weird because book 3 doesn't make much sense as a mystery without reading book 1...really, Book 2 is the only "true" standalone of the first several novels.


Started book 2 of Mistborn. Still not sure if I'll finish it but the friend who suggested it ("recommended" is too strong a word) said that the 2nd one is where things go completely off the rails in an either hilarious or infuriating way, so I'm looking forward to watching the fireworks.

For right now though, I'm just slogging through the opening 5 chapters from an author who thinks he has to recap everything down to the most basic worldbuilding at the start of his sequel. Loads of clunky asides and weird tangents just to clarify who everybody is and how they can use their superpowers. Has anyone actually ever picked up the 2nd book of a series and gotten mad that they didn't re-explain all the stuff from the first entry?

Yeah...TBH, Misborn is the book that made me fall in love with Sanderson's work. The rest of the Mistborn novels are what made me fall OUT of love lol.

[Dragonus45]

You'll miss out on some worldbuilding, but Butcher writes them in a way that (until a certain point) you should be able to follow the core story of the book wherever you start: personally, I'd recommend starting at either book 3 or 7, as 3 is where he first starts building the foundations of an overarching storyline, and 7 was deliberately written in a way that anyone could jump in. Five's decent enough for a start.

I think three is particularly important because the stuff that happens has a profound effect on Dresden mentally, and if someone really felt the need to skip books I would say to start there.

[Taevyr]

Yeah...TBH, Misborn is the book that made me fall in love with Sanderson's work. The rest of the Mistborn novels are what made me fall OUT of love lol.

I'll always be grateful that the first Sanderson novel I stumbled upon after finishing Wheel of Time was Way of Kings: If I'd started with Mistborn, I don't know if I'd have bothered looking up others after Well.

[KorvinStarmast]

Reading them in order...

You'll miss out on some worldbuilding, but Butcher writes them in a way

I would definitely recommend reading the first three, as they're still solid books (even if they are weaker in general than the rest of the series). However, I'd say Book 4 (Summer Knight) is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL reading going forward

I think three is particularly important because the stuff that happens has a profound effect on Dresden mentally, and if someone really felt the need to skip books I would say to start there.
Many thank you's to all of you for the insights. :smallsmile:
I have an Amazon coupon that I have not yet used, I think I'll get books 1-3 using that, the used book store didn't have very many Dresden Files books. Glad the one I started with is a decent one.

[Rynjin]

There are both Kindle and hardback versions of the series that contain books 1-3 and I think 4-6 at a bargain price, so definitely consider looking for those.

[Dragonus45]

Many thank you's to all of you for the insights. :smallsmile:
I have an Amazon coupon that I have not yet used, I think I'll get books 1-3 using that, the used book store didn't have very many Dresden Files books. Glad the one I started with is a decent one.

You said you started on book 5? Yea that one slaps.

[KorvinStarmast]

There are both Kindle and hardback versions of the series that contain books 1-3 and I think 4-6 at a bargain price, so definitely consider looking for those. Hmm, do Kindle books work on a PC? I gave my kindle fire to my son years ago...

[Mechalich]

Hmm, do Kindle books work on a PC? I gave my kindle fire to my son years ago...

They do. You can either download Kindle for PC, or use the Kindle Cloud Reader through your browser.

[KorvinStarmast]

They do. You can either download Kindle for PC, or use the Kindle Cloud Reader through your browser. Thank you! I may do just that.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Finally read the 3rd book in the Scholomance trilogy. Really liked it; for all their horror (and surliness from the main character), they're ultimately pretty optimistic and idealistic stories. I've also been reading a lot of Seanan McGuire books, specifically the first few books in the InCryptid and Ghost Stories series.

Next up on the list is The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which I started reading while on vacation 7 months ago, until it got returned before I finished, and I've had it on hold at the library since.

After that, Valor's Choice, the first of a sci-fi series I read years ago, and am now rereading because I tried to read the latest in the series and had no idea what was going on.

[Eldan]

Finally read the 3rd book in the Scholomance trilogy. Really liked it; for all their horror (and surliness from the main character), they're ultimately pretty optimistic and idealistic stories.


You should go back a few pages, we had a lengthy discussion about the ending there. Your opinion?

[PoeticallyPsyco]

You should go back a few pages, we had a lengthy discussion about the ending there. Your opinion?

So, thinking about it some more, I think the ending fits quite well with the themes.

Namely that on an individual/small-scale level, people are generally compassionate, even good, but once you get to the institutional level that same compassion starts causing problems. When presented with the choice "You can save this person/child in front of you, and all it will cost you is some effort and maybe risk to yourself", most people will choose to help. The problem is once you reach the level of enclaves (and politics in general) that choice gets the addendum "and some risk to someone else you've never met and never will", and people will still choose to save the person in front of them, the person they actually care about. On an individual level, things can go right, people can be happy, but making institutional changes takes a lot more work.

So I think it makes sense that saving Orion just plain works, but changing the enclave system will be the work of a lifetime and may not be permanently possible at all.

Feel like I'm not explaining this as best I can, but those are my thoughts so far.

I also really enjoyed the plot twist that El was destroying the enclaves after all, by destroying the maw-mouths. We had the most crucial information, the timeline, the entire time, but because we the readers get fed the information as discrete bits very separated in both time and context, I never once connected the dots. An extremely well foreshadowed twist that I nevertheless did not see coming at all.

[Eldan]

Yeah, that plot twist worked really well.

[BloodSquirrel]

I caught on a bit before El did, but a plot twist that I see coming because the clues have been well-laid is always better than a plot twist that I didn't because it doesn't make any sense.

[Velaryon]

I've been listening to the audiobook of All of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman. It's YA fantasy, but so far it hasn't been too tropey, and I really like the premise.

The best way I can describe the setup is, it's the Holy Grail War from Fate/Stay Night, except instead of summoning servants the mages are fighting each other directly. And instead of being a secret battle for power, someone published a tell-all book and now the world is treating it like a reality show, with people speculating on who's going to win, paparazzi following the mages around before the start of the competition, and magic shops competing to sponsor the different contestants.

It's just getting to the part where the battle actually begins, so I'm excited to see how things turn out.

[LibraryOgre]

The Boy and I are reading Magnus Chase: Sword of Summer together; I've got the ebook, he's got the audiobook. He loves the Aesir and Vanir, so getting him into this has been great.

[Peelee]

I found out someone got the rights to make My Cousin Vinny novels continuing the stories of Vincent LaGuardia Gambini and Mona Lisa Vito. I got the audio book to listen to during my commute.

It is the single worst thing I've ever encountered. It is a masterpiece of crap, truly unparalleled and is only not immortalized among the worst schlock there is through its obscurity. I thought about making a let's read thread for it on the boards but it wouldnt be suitable due to my reactions of incredible rage and profuse swearing.

Y'all should check it out. It's atrocious.

[Rynjin]

The Boy and I are reading Magnus Chase: Sword of Summer together; I've got the ebook, he's got the audiobook. He loves the Aesir and Vanir, so getting him into this has been great.

How are the Magnus Chase books compared to the Percy Jackson novels?

[LibraryOgre]

How are the Magnus Chase books compared to the Percy Jackson novels?

Not too far different, IMO, but it's been ten years since I read PJ.

[Bohandas]

Just finished the complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, including the last two novels which I'd never really read properly before because they didn't grab my attention like the others the first time I read the series

[Dragonus45]

I found out someone got the rights to make My Cousin Vinny novels continuing the stories of Vincent LaGuardia Gambini and Mona Lisa Vito. I got the audio book to listen to during my commute.

It is the single worst thing I've ever encountered. It is a masterpiece of crap, truly unparalleled and is only not immortalized among the worst schlock there is through its obscurity. I thought about making a let's read thread for it on the boards but it wouldnt be suitable due to my reactions of incredible rage and profuse swearing.

Y'all should check it out. It's atrocious.

I have an audible credit to spare while I wait on the second Beware of Chicken book to come out, I may check this out thank you!