The Book Thread

[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.

[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.

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.

Spoiler: The ending twist

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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.

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...

Spoiler: Ready Player One

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The main character is dropped into a virtual recreation of cult 80s films and must recite the dialogue, word for word.

This is portrayed as a good, cool thing to do.

https://xkcd.com/16/