Results 811 to 840 of 858
Thread: The Book Thread
-
2024-03-27, 02:57 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2020
-
2024-03-27, 04:31 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2006
- Location
- London, England.
Re: The Book Thread
I think you, the friends that you talk about, and Warty here are all basically doing exactly the same thing you've all got your worldviews which set out what people are supposed to find attractive in a romantic partner, and you're running into all these stories which seem to indicate something rather different, and you're trying to reconcile the contradiction. And yes, that's doable with enough effort, but personally I think it's a lot easier to just look at how things are and take that as a starting point instead.
I'm the author of the Alex Verus series of urban fantasy novels. Fated is the first, and the final book in the series, Risen, is out as of December 2021. For updates, check my blog!
-
2024-03-27, 06:07 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2005
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
I think part of the problem is that "attracted to someone dangerous" and "finds happiness with someone safe" are both stories. Nobody is ever going to get into someone else's head and find out what makes their relationship tick, so in the end all we can do is listen to each other's stories (or watch and make up our own stories), and both have been told hundreds of times. And right now, the latter story is in vogue, and the actual consequences of the first one are being deconstructed to hell and back, so it's kind of jarring to see it played straight. (And older stories like, "finds happiness with someone who was chosen for them" and "hates the person chosen for them" are occasionally being threaded around the others.)
I'm pretty much the opposite of concise. If I fail to get to the point, please ask me and I'm happy to (attempt to) clarify.
-
2024-03-28, 11:20 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2007
- Location
- San Antonio, Texas
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
I realized I'd spent a few years following John Scalzi and Ursula Vernon on social media, but had never read anything by them. So, I'm reading Kaiju Preservation Society, which I'm enjoying a lot.
The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.
-
2024-03-28, 03:53 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2013
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
I'm not sure I understand your point. My only claim about what people are "supposed" to find attractive is that they have to find some facet of the person compelling. I don't think that's an unreasonable or rigid worldview.
My point was about how I used to think there was a single correct rubric, followed by the realization that there's no right answer -- it's always going to be subjective. Negative personality traits (especially ones that only some people consider negative) are only part of the equation, and if a person is compelling enough in other ways then they'll still be attractive to the chooser.
The same applies to fiction. If a character is compelling to me, I'll overlook their flaws or even find them endearing. But if they're not compelling, it doesn't matter to me if they somehow possess zero negative or annoying traits -- "not being bad" isn't a real motivator for most people.Last edited by Ionathus; 2024-03-28 at 03:54 PM.
-
2024-03-29, 03:19 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2013
Re: The Book Thread
I like John Scalzi's work a lot, and Kaiju Preservation Society is a ton of fun. If you're looking for more Scalzi, my personal favorites are Agent to the Stars, Red Shirts, and Fuzzy Nation.
Agent to the Stars is about first contact with aliens, who survey the Earth first and decide that if they landed humanity would attack on sight. So they go to Hollywood to get some good publicity first...
Red Shirts is a giant piss-take of Star Trek, and for my money stands alongside Galaxy Quest as the best loving parodies of the show. It's Star Trek written from the perpective of Ensign Ricky.
Fuzzy Nation is a first contact story about trying to prove the sentience of an alien lifeform to protect it. I love that type of story, and Fuzzy Nation is an excellent example of it.
Scalzi also wrote a couple series of police procedurals - the Dispatcher series and the Lock In series. The Lock In series is my preferred read of the two.
-
2024-03-29, 03:28 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2019
- Location
- Melbourne, Australia
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
I've just finished Andre Norton's "The Beast Master" which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had the feeling that I'd read this decades ago, but nothing was familiar. I have the second book, Lord of Thunder, to start reading tonight.
After that, following recommendations here, I've got John Scalzi's "Agent to the Stars" and "The Androids Dream" to read. I'd previously read Red Shirts, and I agree its a great parody!
-
2024-03-29, 08:01 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2015
- Location
- Texas
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
I read it well before the movie came out. I think it was a Daw paperback. While I enjoyed the Movie, it wasn't quite what the book was. About the same time I read the Jargoon Pard, also by Norton. My early D&D years saw me dig up a lot of SFF and Speculative Fiction books (like The Forgotten Beasts of Eld).
Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2024-03-29 at 08:02 AM.
Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Worksa. Malifice (paraphrased):
Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
b. greenstone (paraphrased):
Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society
-
2024-03-29, 12:58 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
- Location
- Bristol, UK
Re: The Book Thread
For parody, very little beats Harry Harrison's "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers".
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
-
2024-03-29, 02:45 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2011
- Gender
-
2024-03-29, 03:33 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2005
- Location
- Santa Barbara, CA
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
Very frustrated with my current read
Peter Jackson's (no not that one-the ponce in Staffordshire not Hobbiton's Shire)
From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane (published Feb of this year)
Don't click but I'm polite
It is tripe. After a long and arrogant introduction we have 450 pages of who begat who, who stabbed who, who camped where, long issues of office politics in three languages (Mongol, Turkish, and Persian). After that its runs out to page 725 with a couple of useful family tree's of the Ilkanate and other Central Asian lines but a pound of endnotes to tot around whenever the book is being perused.
Absolutely nothing about the cultural dynamics that was causing the issues that are alluded to in terms of nomad settled interraltions within the empire. economics, social norms around Islamisation of rule caste vs just its internal use by one bloke so that he could label his own tendency to slaughter and hold his political followers together via conquest some type of justified cause. Nothing about anyone not of noble blood (or affected noble blood). So real sense of time or place. What I wouldn't give for a good lake core pollen study to ground the musings about stray marks of royal documents. It is like reading a Bob Woodward white house tell-all from 1400 (well 1370-1405).
I love history, but this is the kind of rubbish that leads to the subject being well hated by many people.
I fully plan to finish the last few chapters and may trawl it again for various facts that will become important when I learn some third party fact or argument at some indeterminate future date, but Thor's Nuts it's frustrating.
I shall reward myself with the new edition of Confessions of an Economic Hitman (12 new chapters since the 2004? edition apparently) when I finish this.
anyway 2/10 do not recommend.Last edited by sktarq; 2024-03-29 at 03:56 PM.
-
2024-03-30, 06:31 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2006
- Location
- London, England.
Re: The Book Thread
So I've been re-reading Mother of Learning and I've been reminded of just how good it is. It's probably the best of all of the modern crop of LitRPG/progression fantasy stories, and it's especially interesting if you're familiar with D&D 3.0/3.5 since it does a really good job of taking a lot of elements of D&D and fitting them together into a coherent world.
For instance, one of the fundamental elements of D&D is right in the name dungeons (adventure locations) and dragons (huge lethal monsters). Which creates a lot of world-building challenges when you try to figure out how these things would actually work how can you have these locations filled with deadly monsters at the same time as a human/demi-human civilisation? Wouldn't one side just wipe out the other? This is why low-level or low-magic setting like Eberron struggle to make sense it's really hard to square human-scale settings which also happen to have CR 20 world-destroying entities that could raze entire cities to the ground if they ever decide to come out of the wilderness, but they just . . . don't, for some reason. The Mother of Learning setting does have both of these things, and does so due to a mechanic (ambient mana levels) that ties into the whole magic system and completely makes sense.
It's also a lot of fun seeing the D&D schools of magic organised into a coherent whole, with discussions of how the various schools would work in practice. For instance, the D&D equivalent of enchantment in the Mother of Learning is "mind magic", and has an extremely dodgy reputation due to its potential for abuse as such, most mind magic spells are restricted and the mage guild comes down very harshly on anyone caught using them without permission. Necromancy and the creation of sentient undead was banned due to succession crises caused by members of the aristocracy turning themselves into vampires/liches so that they could rule their fiefdoms forever and never have to turn them over to their children, leading (unsurprisingly) to a continental war when the major necromancy-using country decided it didn't want to play along.
Mother of Learning was originally webfiction published on Royal Road, but it's now made the jump to traditional publishing and has paper/audio/ebook editions. I'd definitely recommend it.I'm the author of the Alex Verus series of urban fantasy novels. Fated is the first, and the final book in the series, Risen, is out as of December 2021. For updates, check my blog!
-
2024-03-30, 10:46 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
- Location
- Bristol, UK
Re: The Book Thread
I've read that, and for me (as a non-player of D&D) it's okay, but it's not the best ever web serial.
I read a lot of web-serials, and most of them are indeed barely worth reading, but there are enough real gems to make the whole process well worthwhile.
I really like Under the Dragon Eye Moons, I read it from the start on royal road, you can't do that any more because it's been published on Amazon. It starts off a little weak, Rynjin read the first book on Kindle and didn't like it, but it has been going for several years, and though it's still ongoing by now it's getting really good, IMHO.
Another good one is The Gods are Bastards, I think that's currently available to read for free, though I suspect that's liable to change pretty soon, it's again not finished yet, but what there is so far is amazing and bodes well for the future if it's ever finished.
The Wandering Inn is huge, I believe it's already the longest work of fiction (no doubt some AI is going to write something longer next week), and it's about half done according to the author. It's a sprawling mess, but there are a lot of good bits in it.
There are other good webserials, but these are probably my cream of the crop this week.Last edited by halfeye; 2024-03-30 at 10:48 AM.
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
-
2024-03-30, 11:43 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2006
- Location
- London, England.
Re: The Book Thread
I've heard a lot about Wandering Inn, but most of what I've heard doesn't make it sound that amazing. I suspect just from its length that it has to be pretty mediocre for the most part no way you're going to have good structure/pacing/plotting when you're churning out that much wordcount that quickly with minimal editing.
I might give the other two a try.I'm the author of the Alex Verus series of urban fantasy novels. Fated is the first, and the final book in the series, Risen, is out as of December 2021. For updates, check my blog!
-
2024-03-30, 02:14 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2016
Re: The Book Thread
The Wandering Inn is a slice-of-life tale primarily, at least for a good chunk of its run, and is more focused on the world and daily lives of the characters in it than plot much of the time. That's why the volume of writing works to its benefit.
It is the kind of story that can ONLY be told within the confines of a web serial. Crunching down the plot to fit within the covers of a traditional novel would lose just about everything that makes it special. The entire story is basically about how one person just living their lives and being themselves can slowly but surely make a web of connections that affects the fate of entire nations.
Originally Posted by halfeye
I read plenty of Beneath the Dragoneye Moons. It's...fluff, mostly. Entertaining up to a point but by the time they arrived in New Vampsville or whatever the vampire city was called I was pretty much checked out, and dropped it.
I largely lost interest post-timeskip and was continuing on via inertia at that point. The author gambled that the main character and the viewpoint character of an inferior side series were enough to carry the series while cutting the entire rest of the supporting cast and yeeting all of the existing worldbuilding out the window. IMO, they lost. Elaine is not a good enough MC to function without her supporting cast.
Anyway, this discussion DID remind me I haven't finished the last two Alex Verus novels, so I think I might pick those up now the series has concluded. I think I finished book 10but some of the details are fuzzy. Maybe requires a re-read.Spoilerwhichever one he gets the super de duper fateweaving wand grafted to his body at the end of
-
2024-03-30, 08:55 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2006
- Location
- Watching the world go by
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
Very few characters are strong enough to hold together a plot without their supporting cast. The Skyward series, by Brandon Sanderson, seems to drop most of its supporting cast at the end of every book, but the main character is still interacting with the same world and the same problems. Also, the main character keeps trying to get back home so the other characters get mentioned occasionally. "Speaker for the Dead" has about 1 character in common with "Ender's Game", but it is very much its own plot moving on rather than just another step in a serial. The only other series I can think of where main characters get dropped regularly is Narnia, and almost every time they switch up the main characters the quality of the books goes down.
-
2024-04-01, 06:29 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2006
- Location
- London, England.
Re: The Book Thread
A couple of new things that I've been reading:
Theft of Swords by Michael J Sullivan. This was . . . okay. Writing quality is decent, setting seems reasonably interesting. My problem was the characters the viewpoint characters are supposed to be thieves and mercenaries, but they really don't act like it. I think the author's one of those people who's got a very romanticised idea of the criminal underworld his 'criminals' all act like nice, trustworthy, middle-class Americans whose jobs just happen to involve break-ins. I gave up around fifty pages in.
The Mine Lord by Trae McMaken. Progression-style webfiction tends to go in for wish-fulfillment and extreme power creep, so this one was a nice little surprise. Survivalist story about a small group of dwarves founding a mine colony in the wilderness. I've never played Dwarf Fortress, but I suspect there are a lot of references here for those who have. Author is surprisingly knowledgable about mining I learned a lot of new geology-related vocabulary. Story's apparently completed, though I haven't finished it yet.I'm the author of the Alex Verus series of urban fantasy novels. Fated is the first, and the final book in the series, Risen, is out as of December 2021. For updates, check my blog!
-
2024-04-05, 03:13 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2007
- Location
- San Antonio, Texas
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
I finished Scalzi's "Kaiju Preservation Society". In the writer's note, he describes it as a pop song of a book... short, light, with some catchy hooks... and it definitely was. But it was also very fun to read, with some neat worldbuilding about kaiju.
The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.
-
2024-04-05, 05:00 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2008
Re: The Book Thread
Of late, with the end of the small (read as: manageable sized) bookstore that doesn't require a destination trip I have found myself seeking books from the category of "How is it that I haven't read this before?". The two most recent are:
War of the Worlds
An engaging and fairly quick read that let me know that the sci-fi, fantasy or scary story where the main character (not necessarily protagonist) survives a dizzying number of situations where tons of people die around them is definitely not a new phenomena. I always worry about vernacular in true classics (am I going to not understand something important because I have no idea what a strange word, likely slang, used in England in 189x means?), but that wasn't a problem this time around.
Dracula
Stunned that I have never actually started, much less finished, this novel. Particularly stunning because (a) I love the feel of the four characters adapted into the Paramount Monsters, (b) Frakenstein ranks as one of my favorite books of all time, though probably in part because of the reality surrounding the development of the story and the struggles with publication and all of that, and (c) Dracula, duh!
Is this the first found-footage scary story? If so, much MUCH better than that Blair Witch crap. So far I have yet to actively root for any of the protagonists to be eaten, and that happened about 30 seconds in to Blair Witch (and every other found-footage story I can recall seeing). The slang is an occasional problem, but the accent writing is sometimes more troubling...particularly when Stoker combines slang and accent. Ugh! At least I was able to figure out what "bloofer" meant before I moved past those references!
- MNo matter where you go...there you are!
Holhokki Tapio - GitP Blood Bowl New Era Season I Champion
Togashi Ishi - Betrayal at the White Temple
Da Monsters of Da Midden - GitP Blood Bowl Manager Cup Season V-VI-VII
-
2024-04-05, 09:38 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2016
-
2024-04-06, 10:35 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2013
Re: The Book Thread
War of the Worlds is startlingly easy to read considering its age. I was also surprised that despite being a progenitor of alien invasion novels it doesn't hew to the same "unstoppable alien that wins the war in 10 minutes" that so much modern fiction relies on. The Martian tripods aren't shielded and aren't made out of indestructible metal, and the military puts up a very good fight. They destroy a lot of tripods and force the Martians to resort to chemical/biological weapons to deal with all the cannons which keep sniping them.
-
2024-04-06, 02:56 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
- Location
- Bristol, UK
-
2024-04-10, 11:55 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2013
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
I also enjoy alien war stories where it's not an anticlimax war one way or the other -- anticlimax does make the most "sense", though, given how hard space travel is. Whichever civilization manages to visit the other civilization (with hostile intent, given the scenario) is probably on a way higher scale of tech than the civilization they're visiting. It wouldn't be Stormtroopers vs. Ewoks...it would be Farmer vs. Rose Bush.
Of course, just because an anticlimax is the most "realistic" doesn't mean it's the most interesting. I love how District 9 explores the idea of aliens coming to Earth and then somehow getting conquered & captured by humans -- their leadership structure died en route and the "grunts" lack the skills to operate all their higher-scale tech. It's a fun way of leveling the playing field between interstellar travelers and a planet that's still pretty proud about touching its own moon.
-
2024-04-13, 06:02 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2015
Re: The Book Thread
War of the Worlds does operate with the conceit that the aliens are from Mars, making it an interplanetary rather than interstellar war, and interplanetary travel is about ten thousand times easier than interstellar travel. IIRC, the novel doesn't really speculate on the motives of the Martians, but it can be imagined that they had been monitoring Earth for some time, watched the industrial revolution occur, and came to the decision 'we've got to attack now or it'll be too late' sometime around 1850, but struggled with delays getting their invasion program going and ended up arriving with significantly less technological advantage than they anticipated.
A similar conceit is found in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, in which the aliens plan for a 'Stormtroopers versus Ewoks' scenario based on intelligence data from a probe sent to Earth in the 1100s, only to arrive during WWII and being absolutely gobsmacked by the tech development rate of humans. Those books are pretty campy, but the device works reasonably well to allow what is basically a late 1980s army fight the much larger but technologically inferior armies of WWII.
-
2024-04-15, 10:28 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2012
Re: The Book Thread
I read Animal Farm over a couple of nights recently. A tragically predictable but haunting book.
"Of all the words by tongue and pen, by far the saddest are "I could have been...""
"The first rule of success is to have a vision. You see if you dont have a vision of where you are going, if you dont have a goal for where to go, youll drift around and never end up anywhere...can you imagine a majority of people don't know where they are going? I knew where I was going! Arnold Schwarzenegger
-
2024-04-19, 03:51 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2007
- Location
- San Antonio, Texas
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
I made a quite adorable "eeeee" sound when my coworker brought in my copy of Lyorn that I had on hold.
The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.
-
2024-04-20, 09:37 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2007
- Location
- Tail of the Bellcurve
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
The book pile looms large, but dedicated page miners continue to chip away at its foundations.
Felt like some sci-fi, so read Contact, by Carl Sagen. I'd only ever seen the movie, and to my pleasure the book was at least as good, though substantially different, particularly in the back half. Some of the science vs religion debates were I'm sure substantially more cutting when it was written, but having been online circa 2008 mostly struck me as dull and rehashed. Not the book's fault by any means. But the writing was good if uncomplicated, occasionally quite clever, and overall one of those books with a great sense of concern and detail. Definitely worth a read.
I'm now on Illusion by Paula Volsky. Unusually, instead of a quasi-medieval or Viking fantasy, this is decidedly French revolution fantasy. And while the setup is, by modern standards, extremely standard - oppression, wizards, revolution - the fact that it was written 33 years ago makes it ironically a fairly fresh take on these extremely standard topics. See, the wizards are the oppressors here, a bunch of absolutely horrible and terminally bored nobility. But - and hence the title of the book and also its theme - their powers are all illusion based. Because the superiority of the nobility is an illusion, do'ya getit? (to be fair, it isn't like the book beats you over the head with this theme, but it's definitely the theme.) At the time the book is set most of the nobility don't even bother to use their magic, if they have it at all. So really the nobility are just a bunch of rich hereditary land owners with massive superiority complexes, some of whom can do some party tricks. Even the illusion is an illusion.
Also atypical, our protagonist is a decidedly not revolutionary 17 year old noble girl, off at court to wait on not Marie Antoinette. This is fun because she's extremely privileged, enormously sheltered, and like 95% comfortable with the status quo, which lets the author set her up as unintentionally wrong about pretty much everything. So we, the audience, get to watch this whole corrupt edifice teetering on the brink through the eyes of somebody very much in the edifice's tank. It's a pretty nifty trick having the protagonist be ignorant and wrong while telling this to the reader, and Volsky walks it pretty well, particularly in the opening chapters at her (genuinely awful) father's country estate, where we see an extremely injust and genuinely infuriating system through the eyes of somebody who has like this vague inkling that maybe her father shouldn't get to dissect the serf's bodies just because he feels like.
All in all a good read. The prose is decent enough, though extremely straight forward. This is not the sort of book you will ever think "wow, what a marvelous turn of phrase" about. Which is fine, just slightly dull at times. But the unconventional setting and characters and delicious use of narrative irony more than make up for that.Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,And he lay in his blood on the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.
Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, 1906.
-
2024-04-21, 12:22 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2007
- Location
- Knoxville Tennessee
- Gender
Re: The Book Thread
Thanks to Linklele for my new avatar!
If i had superpowers. I would go to conventions dressed as myself, and see if i got complimented on my authenticity.
-
2024-04-21, 09:36 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2009
-
2024-04-22, 02:54 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2006
- Location
- London, England.
Re: The Book Thread
Oh, I didn't hate the writing he's actually a step above most fantasy authors as far as that goes. It's more that I just can't make his takes on thieves and criminals match up with my experience of real-life ones. Actual criminal life sucks because of how low-trust it is. It's what drives most of them out eventually they either burn out or get sold out. But Michael Sullivan's criminal protagonists all act towards each other like people who've been raised in a super safe, high-trust environment. They aren't worried about their "friends" betraying them at all in fact, when they do get betrayed, it's by their high-class client!
I'm the author of the Alex Verus series of urban fantasy novels. Fated is the first, and the final book in the series, Risen, is out as of December 2021. For updates, check my blog!