📚 The book lovers thread
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@dse Steven Erikson's other books in that series are much longer, but then the killing of gods and raising of new ones in their place is no minor thing to be done in a couple of sentences. Perhaps they could have been shortened by a good editor, but I don't know what they could have actually cut. I liked them a lot. ;)
I know what you mean about Sanderson's works.
Pratchett's last few books weren't quite as good (the Alzheimers was having an effect) but you've got many to listen to before that.
And if you don't know them, the SF works by Iain M Banks are proof that SF can be true literature as well. You might or might not agree with his politics, but his writing is wonderful. It's a massive shame that he died so young. :(
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@blakeyrat said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
@dkf I got that same sense when I read Solaris and Roadside Picnic (the collection of stories that the film Stalker is based on, and the video game STALKER is loosely based on.)
What matters to Russians, at least during the USSR, was so weird and different than what Americans cared about. Sure, both cultures were excited about building rockets, going to strange planets, playing with advanced alien technology, but the Russian stories have this amazing emotional focus that was never present in US sci-fi of the same era.
As a late-comer to Solaris (I didn't watch the film version until the George Clooney remake came out), it really made me kick myself that I hadn't read it years ago.
My copy of Roadside Picnic also contains a little essay describing how difficult it was to get the book past the censors, which I found amazing. They read it as some kind of screed against capitalism (even though that's hardly the point), so they simply moved the setting to the US and kept the rest mostly the same.
Solaris is a book written by a Pole, not a Russian. And Roadside Picnic is one story, rather than a collection of them.
Check your facts, sheeple!
ETA
d by so much I thought I'd drop in another anectode about Lem: he thought there were two American sci-fi writers worth a shit in the 60s (or were they the 70s?): Dick and Le Guin. Gather he was right?
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I just finished reading this Saga of Tuck thing. @ScholRLEA any other good suggestions? The Netflix genre would probably be Quirky LGBT Dramas, if anyone else knows any
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@Yamikuronue said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Quirky LGBT Dramas,
Making Time by Stephen Fry is quite quirky and lgbtish. It also involves Nazis and time travel
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@Magus said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I read a book a while back that was truly awful, like you-guys-don't-even-want-to-know-level. It was suggested to me automatically by amazon, knowing that I liked diskworld. I can't remember the name, but that's for the best as I haven't read worse, but it was something like "wizards, amazons, and bikers" - about a bad wizards who summons a British biker accidentally during a wizards' duel. It could have been a lot of fun. It wasn't. There are more of them apparently, which is almost nauseating.
It's a bit older but Alan Dean Foster's "Spellsinger" uses a variant of that - a sorcerer needs some assistance against Dark Forces and decides to summon an "Engineer" from our world (the idea was to add technology to their magic in order to overcome the enemy).
This of course goes completely wrong because he summons Jon-Tom, a law student who works part-time as a facility manager. His official title is "sanitary engineer".
Jon-Tom later on discovers that he can do magic through Spellsinging. Due to his novice status (and his dubious choice of songs), he usually gets what he needs. Which is not necessarily equal to what he wants.
The series is quite humorous and has some nice ideas - like a gay unicorn (you know the stories how one can trap a unicorn with a virgin? Well...) and a Red Dragon (who's a Marxist).
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https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/55v9e1/chrysalis/
Guy posted an entire 16 chapter original novel to HFY (Humanity Fuck Yeah!) subreddit.
And it's the best fucking SF story I've read in years.
Read the first chapter at least, there's no way it won't draw you in. Highly recommended.
Tip: Stop at chapter 15. The last chapter was an epilogue too many IMO.
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Just finished this:
Wow! an old jewel and unexpectedly fine story, very well thought.
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Recently (as in, uh, a month or so...) finished The Foreworld Saga. It's pretty interesting, but the Mongoliad trilogy portion is by far the better IMO. I found the last two books incredibly depressing.
I just finished Dungeon Born a week ago, which is LitRPG, but pretty soft in comparison with the archetype tales with literal stat sheets every couple of chapters. It's not super complex, but I thought it was well done. It does end on a bit of a cliffhanger, but it's the sort of cliffhanger that makes a good end of a book . Just really well done in comparision to a lot of other genre competitors. The sequel is planned for January, so I'm glad I picked up the first book when I did and don't have to wait a year like the first readers
:]Currently I'm working my way through The Lord of the Rings. Finished The Hobbit, 70% through The Fellowship of the Ring. Great stuff, I should have picked it up sooner.
I also enjoy sci-fi. A few ongoing series where I now have more content to read are Evan Currie's The Scourwind Legacy (although I haven't been able to get back into it really; the sequel has a much less interesting opening IMO and I haven't gotten past it yet) and Terry Mixon's The Empire of Bones and Humanity Unlimited. A series I desperately want more of is Edward McKeown's The Maauro Chronicles, while M. R. Forbes's War Eternal starts out with a deceptively cliché flyboy hotshot plot before before pouring on tons of character development and gargantuan plot twists. Gritty and dark, but really hard to put down after the opening "meh" chapters.
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@pydsigner So many wrap-drive scifi. I am reluctant to touch that genre of scifi because of typically weak story (as if they are anime) but am eager to start a great one. I love star wars (the movie, not novelized) because the tragedy (father and son) makes it a masterpiece.
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@antiquarian said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Did anyone else read the entire Wheel of Time series?
I've read all of Robert Jordan's books. I haven't started the ones by Brendan Sanderson yet. It's been a few years, so I might have to re-read from the beginning.
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@dse I enjoyed Starwalker. The story is unfinished, and the author hasn't posted for over a year, but what is there is pretty good, IMO.
A mind in a metal shell
The Starwalker is an experimental vessel equipped with a star-stepping drive. She's brand new, the paint is still wet, and she's working out the kinks in her new skin. She has a lot to learn, and what the hell is this engine of hers anyway?
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@djls45 said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I haven't started the ones by Brendan Sanderson yet.
He finishes the sprawl off about as quickly as possible without doing an “and then they all woke up and it was all a dream. The End.” So… three long books. Anyone getting into the Wheel of Time needs to expect to be reading rather a lot because there are a lot of significant characters being followed as opposed to the more usual thing with a story which is to only follow one protagonist or a small group of them who mainly stay together.
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@cartman82 said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Read the first chapter at least, there's no way it won't draw you in.
If it turns out any other way than that humanity did this to itself, I shall be disappoint.
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@cartman82 said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Guy posted an entire 16 chapter original novel to HFY (Humanity Fuck Yeah!) subreddit.
And it's the best fucking SF story I've read in years.
Read the first chapter at least, there's no way it won't draw you in. Highly recommended.
Tip: Stop at chapter 15. The last chapter was an epilogue too many IMO.
Needs an editor pretty desperately. Good concept, though.
Also in the former-human-AI-as-a-viewpoint-protagonist genre is this entry:
Which I like. A lot.
Lately, I've taken a brief break from scifi and have been hitting a few modern military aviation memoirs.
This is basically a research dive for something I meant to write for NaNoWriMo. From here, I need to hit memoirs of a pilot or two of more... Shall we say, high performance aircraft. Like, say, the SR-71.
I'm rather annoyed that it's so fucking hard to get a legitimate copy of Sled Driver, what with completely fucking ruined copies going for $300. So I downloaded a scan of it. Seriously, guys. If you're going to make money selling books YOU KIND OF NEED TO FUCKING SELL BOOKS.
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@Weng Skunk Works is an awesome book. Made me want to go into aeronautical engineering before I switched to physics. I especially like the story about an entire government-grown crop of marijuana that was stolen when then U-2 was being tested as an anti-drug spy plane.
@Weng said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I'm rather annoyed that it's so fucking hard to get a legitimate copy of Sled Driver, what with completely fucking ruined copies going for $300. So I downloaded a scan of it. Seriously, guys. If you're going to make money selling books YOU KIND OF NEED TO FUCKING SELL BOOKS.
Yeah, the people selling out-of-print books online are insane. I prefer books to e-readers, so it took me some months to get a copy of Ignition: an informal history of rocket fuel for anything like a reasonable price. Look at the idiotic pricing here:
Luckily, these sellers tend to be idiots in multiple ways. Lots of them use automatic pricing software to change their list price to be just under the current lowest price. If two sellers do the same thing (and they're not paying attention), they'll slowly bid the price down. I wrote a simple
wget | grepscript to watch the prices, and over the course of six weeks the price came down from $5k to less than $100. Since there are so many sellers for Sled Driver, I think there's a good chance the same strategy could work.There's a new ebay auction for a copy here, too.
By the way, I highly recommend Ignition. Lots of stories of maniacs trying to blow themselves up plus a lot of deep knowledge on the chemistry of rocket fuel. A choice quote on chlorine trifluoride:
It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
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@flabdablet said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
If it turns out any other way than that humanity did this to itself, I shall be disappoint.
It's posted in the "Humanity, fuck yeah!" subreddit, so that's not likely :)
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@Weng said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Also in the former-human-AI-as-a-viewpoint-protagonist genre is this entry:
I'm intrigued by the summary.
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@Weng said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Also in the former-human-AI-as-a-viewpoint-protagonist genre is this entry:
Which I like. A lot.
Oh yeah I read that book not that long ago. Pretty cool!
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@MZH said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
A choice quote on chlorine trifluoride:
Wonder if there's a copy on the net.
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@Maciejasjmj That's where I found out about the book. There is a PDF version floating around that's easily googlable.
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@r10pez10 Haven't seen PICNIC before. That's quite tidy. I'll probably start using that instead of PEBKAC now.
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@r10pez10 Wait, isn't "bang" general british slang? It's only an IT thing?
All of that sounds almost, but not quite, right to my American ears.
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@Yamikuronue said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Wait, isn't "bang" general british slang? It's only an IT thing?
It's both: you can end a sentence with a bang, go out with a bang, and also bang your girlfriend.
English: it's banging great
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@RaceProUK Right, so why is ! being called 'bang' listed as obscure IT slang in a British book?
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@Yamikuronue If I had to guess, it's because it's only really called a bang in Unix-world, at least in my experience e.g. shell scripts starting with a shebang.
According to Wikipedia, the use of the word 'bang' to mean
!actually started in America; the British/Commonwealth equivalent slang is 'pling'. I'd quote the actual sources, but they're dead tree sources, and I don't have any copies of them.
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@Yamikuronue said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I just finished reading this Saga of Tuck thing. @ScholRLEA any other good suggestions? The Netflix genre would probably be Quirky LGBT Dramas, if anyone else knows any
Sorry for the late reply, I missed this earlier... I've mentioned Whateley Academy several times before, but you said good suggestions... I mean, I like it a lot, but the quality is rather spotty, to say the least... the Diane Castle and Bek de Corbin material is mostly OK (and often a lot more than just OK), and some of Joe Gunnarson's and E.E. Nalley' stories have their moments... and you'd really have to be into the gender-transformation thing. I'll leave it to you on that.
Also, the site is not well organized for finding the stories, something that tends to put off a lot of curiosity seekers. If you want to try, here is a list I came up with for the series' opening stories (you can expect a lot of Rashomon Style in the early pieces, as most of them show the same events from different POVs; the stories "Second Book of Jobe" - at least in part 2 and part 4, and to lesser degree part 3 as well - and "No Beast So Fierce" do the same, but mostly for humorous effect), and another for the intro/origin stories for most of the major characters.
I'm guessing you've also heard of Tales of MU already (Very NSFW), and if you haven't... well, my recommendation is that if you are curious about it, read to the end of the first chapter and see if you like it or not. While it is by a single author, the writing is pretty inconsistent, and full of author-tract stuff about tolerance and transgender issues, a lot of it with not-at-all subtle anti-Christian tone. Also, there is a shit-ton of explicit sex, much of it of the BDSM variety.
Like WA and Saga of Tuck, it is pretty damn long - while it only started in 2007, Alexandra Erin has been posting new material every week, with periods where she posts daily updates, and that doesn't include the side stories or More Tales of MU, so if it does appeal to you - and it won't for most people - be prepared to do a lot of reading. I read through the first, I dunno, three chapters before I lost interest, and while I have been meaning to take another look, it really isn't a high priority to me.
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@ScholRLEA said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I'm guessing you've also heard of Tales of MU already
I was in the TOMU fanclub on Muelsfell when I met my senpai @kaelas :D
I dropped off it during the leadup to... what was it, the halloween party? After the main character
ate someone and got piercingsTime was just not flowing at a rate that seemed appropriate for the character development; it was like 0 -> evil in 1 month flat. Though:
@ScholRLEA said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
explicit sex, much of it of the BDSM variety
doesn't bother me at all.
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@Yamikuronue Fair enough. I didn't know if you'd seen it or not, nor what your thoughts on the S-E-X stuff was. I have no problem with explicit sex myself, and the only reason I am leery of BDSM is because I have bad associations about it regarding my father (something I have mentioned a number of times before). I'm not really into myself, even though he thought I was (he thought everyone was, and they were just in denial, so that's nothing specifically about me), and while I don't have a problem reading about it, it does tend to be a bit awkward for me.
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@ScholRLEA Cool :) Let me know if you want good BDSM porn someday, to counter some of the bad stuff. I've got a few sources ;)
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@Yamikuronue You know you're discussing this in public, right? :P
And don't be afraid to send some my way.
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@Yamikuronue I'll think about it... it isn't that I've read or watched a lot of bad DBSM porn so much, as that my father (who wasn't one to read much anyway) was very frank and in-your-face about it, everywhere, to everyone, and had a habit of handing out business cards for his adult-toy shop (with his title, "Master Joe", on it) to all and sundry. I am not kidding - I saw him hand a minister one once, a street preacher who clearly didn't approve of what he was saying. And, well, working for him at the swingers' parties and BDSM clubs often meant seeing him demonstrate the products on women, including things like vibrators, floggers, needles, and violet wands (which were his favorite toy, bar none), which I would be fine except it was my father doing it, and he never seemed to get why I would find that uncomfortable.
Seriously, my brother and sister-in-law cut him off from seeing my nieces more than once because he was shooting his mouth off in front of them, or surfing porn in a place where they could have seen him. It never lasted more than a month or two, but he never got why they didn't want him around their kids, so he kept doing it.
Anyway... in regards to the WA stories, I should mention that you might want to read "The Book of Jobe" before reading "The Second Book of Jobe", as the first one explains a lot of the setup of the later story. Also, since the story takes place several months after the first opening of the series, there are some parts of the story that are assumed as background knowledge, such as who the "Bad Seeds" are.
Yeah, I'm pushing that series way too hard, aren't I? Oh, I think I'll go post a quote from the Bad Seeds intro story in the Guilty Pleasures thread, while I am at it.
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@RaceProUK And? ;)
My top two recommendations for BDSM right now are Sunstone (it's on deviantart or you can buy the print volumes on Amazon) and Sir, Butler, and Boy. The former is lesbian and modern-day, the latter gay Victorian-era.
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@ScholRLEA said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
@Yamikuronue I'll think about it... it isn't that I've read or watched a lot of bad DBSM porn so much, as that my father (who wasn't one to read much anyway) was very frank and in-your-face about it, everywhere, to everyone, and had a habit of handing out business cards for his adult-toy shop (with his title, "Master Joe", on it) to all and sundry. I am not kidding - I saw him hand a minister one once, a street preacher who clearly didn't approve of what he was saying. And, well, working for him at the swingers' parties and BDSM clubs often meant seeing him demonstrate the products on women, including things like vibrators, floggers, needles, and violet wands (which were his favorite toy, bar none), which I would be fine except it was my father doing it, and he never seemed to get why I would find that uncomfortable.
Do you understand then why we might find you telling us about your father uncomfortable?
Sometimes I feel some in-thread convos would be better taken to PM, but meh. That's like, just my opinion man.
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Just finished the first book in the LitRPG series Continue Online by Stephan Morse.
It's much more about people than it is about stat grinding, and I definitely would recommend it.
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Finished this after a colleague suggested it:
Very underwhelming. The best review title I found was diary of a wimpy assassin, which pretty much is all there is into the story. Might be fine for boys under 13 who love puppies though.
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Finished this one pretty quickly, because it was hard to stop in the middle, one of those books:
Beautiful fairy-tale for the adults, and nothing is better that having Neil Gaiman's narration in audio-book. I have listened to many audio-books but this is the best by any measure.
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@dse Is that the same story as the movie? I've seen the movie Stardust, and remember it being ok. I'd expect the book is probably better.
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My current pleasure reading material is mostly online fiction:
- Legion of Nothing by Jim Zoetewey is about the super-powered grandkids of an old WWII-era superhero team.
- Super Powereds by Drew Hayes is about 5 college kids with uncontrolled powers who undergo a secret procedure to gain control.
- Anathema by Chrysalis follows three super-powered people as they stumble through a chaotic world that forgot a minute of time when the Pulse granted powers to a selected few.
- Outliers by Knifleman follows two super-powered people who get caught up in an information war between the official public authorities and a secret research organization.
- Stone Burners by syphax1 is about a girl who wakes up with no memory; but she does have scales on her hands and feet, claws, a tail, and wings; and she falls in with a renegade group of vigilantes.
- Hansell's Dragon and Hansell's Hope by Deborah K. Lauro tell a story about a 178 year old geneticist who created the deadly reptile dragons in his youth, a prototype in artifical intelligence, and a penal world that used to be the site of illegal genetics experiments.
- I also have read/am reading the works by Wildbow:
Worm is about a girl who gains the super-power of controlling bugs in her vicinity. Pact is about a guy who inherits a cursed mansion from his demon-hunter grandmother. Twig is about a boy who is a member of an experimental group of children in a world where the mechanical breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution were biological instead.
I have more, but I think this list is plenty for now.
One of my late Christmas presents was a collection of C. S. Lewis's nonfiction books. I'm really excited to get into those as soon as they arrive.
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@djls45 The book is better, the audiobook is the best.
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@cartman82 said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
- Wool (2011) ~ Hugh Howey
https://i.imgur.com/PNRUCaD.jpg
Series of post-apocalyptic stories and novellas, combined into a novel. Pretty damn good.
Unfortunately, by the end of my run with it (Wool 5, Shift 1, Shift 2), I got that familiar feel of an author who's trying to outrun his own loose threads and plot-holes. I still haven't read the remainder of the series. I HOPE he ties it together in a meaningful way, but I'm not sure he'll manage it.
I second the recommendation for Wool.
I was unaware it was a 5-part work, as I was introduced to it through a paperback version with all of Wool 1 through 5, which was given to me as a gift: https://www.amazon.com/Wool-Hugh-Howey/dp/1476733953
Howey's pretty good at writing foreshadowing, cliffhangers, and general giving you just enough information to tease you into reading more. IMO, anyway.
If you read this book I recommend not flipping through the latter pages, as a glimpse of the wrong thing might give you a spoiler and this book is better read as a mystery thriller.
As for the rest of series: I'm half-way through Shift, and while it's not by any means bad (and I am enjoying it), I wouldn't put it quite up there with Wool. Perhaps my expectations were just high. But I feel like the protagonists aren't quite as charismatic in this book, nor is the pacing as fine-tuned.
Still, I recommend Wool on its own. I'm also curious (if not very hopeful) about the movie in development; I do agree with the IMDB commenters who say this would better off as a TV series.
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@dse said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Very underwhelming. The best review title I found was diary of a wimpy assassin, which pretty much is all there is into the story. Might be fine for boys under 13 who love puppies though.
I found the Farseer books really immersive and gripping. Fitz is a complete idiot, but I cared enough about all the characters to mostly be going "No, Fitz! You idiot, that's clearly the wrong thing to do". It makes a change to have a hero who's not that heroic and is just blundering through life
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@dse said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Very underwhelming. The best review title I found was diary of a wimpy assassin, which pretty much is all there is into the story. Might be fine for boys under 13 who love puppies though.
Oh bummer. I've been sitting on the wait list since last Aug. Seems everyone wants to read it...
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@dcon Well, most reviews are very positive! I like SF/Fantasy but only if it is not too YA (naive, limited vocabulary, no story-line, simplistic, deus ex machina revealed magical powers, too whiny and long-winded, ...).
This is another one I found myself to the very opposite of most reviews:
I absolutely hated it, the language was unbearable.
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@dse said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Very underwhelming.
A shame. I quite liked it.
@djls45 said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Super Powereds by Drew Hayes is about 5 college kids with uncontrolled powers who undergo a secret procedure to gain control.
@djls45 said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I also have read/am reading the works by Wildbow:
Two very good titles, I enjoyed them both. Later I started hanging out with both authors from time to time online. Great folks.
@Zecc said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I second the recommendation for Wool.
I also very much enjoyed Wool.
@dse said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
I absolutely hated it
It seems like you just don't like anything too YA-ish. Maybe try Mistborn instead?
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So I decided this year I would attempt to read a book a week however for some reason I decided that this would be limited to Amazon Unlimited books. This is going to end in failure so I may as well document my progress here.
Suggestions welcome.
Book #01
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elements-Eloquence-Perfect-English-Phrase-ebook/dp/B00KFEJN3QIf I read this in my teens I probably would of thought a lot more of Shakespeare and poetry in general.
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@Yamikuronue said in 📚 The book lovers thread:
Maybe try Mistborn instead?
Of course! that is one my favorites.
Earth Abides - Wikipedia
Amazon.com
