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The "What Are You Reading" Thread
Posts
Cordwainer Smith wasn't one of the 60's female pseudonym authors.
May I make a recommendation then? Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins is one of the most clever fiction books ever written in terms of narrative devices and figurative language. I won't spoil the book for you obviously, but many of its key characters are inanimate objects that have entire conversations with each other. It is a work of genius and arguably Robbins' greatest triumph, though I may be saying that only because it is my favorite Tom Robbins book.
I haven't had the pleasure of reading anything of his as of late, because he hasn't written much lately outside of an ironic children's book and a non-fiction compilation. But please do check out Skinny Legs and All. Your pal Form of Monkey wouldn't steer you wrong. :^:
For something not up for discussion, your attempt at discussion is piss-poor.
Guild Wars 2: Entriech.3507 | Scythe Gearsnap, Phlork, Irenic
Porquoi?
Because you've done nothing other then claim you've already made your point, even though you've said nothing?
Because you've posted the equivalent of drive-by trolling?
Because even with your second post you still can't bring yourself to even make a single point?
Okay, then.
You'll love Harry Dresden. Being a snarky bastard is 9/10th of his character, especially in the first few novels.
edit: Felix Castor is a similar character. Never read his novels, though. They were originally based on a failed pitch for Hellblazer by Mike Carey.
Thanks for reminding me. I should read Neuropath and the other, non-fantasy thing he did. I'm a big, big fan of his fantasy series.
You didn't say anything other then "It's not worth discussing". And even that you didn't back up.
There is nothing to discuss other then your trollish behavior.
No, see, what you're writing is just a conclusion. "Wheel of Time has shitty female characters"
Which I personally think is true.
But you shouldn't expect anyone to give a damn about your opinion when you're not providing any examples or reasons to think that, except for a single massive generalization.
Being probably right doesn't excuse shoddy as hell argumentation.
I just don't see them being described as 'harpies' or some of the other words you guys are using. But maybe I'm not reading that deeply into it. It's taken me this long and somebody else's comment here to realize that Mat is apparently Odin. Oh, and that got me thinking, Perrin is possibly Enkidu. Or Elyas is Enkidu.
Anyways, maybe if this is that big of a topic, we should make our own thread for WoT? Since some of us seem to be reading/rereading them?
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
Perrin is Thor. The hammer and all.
Rand is Tyr btw.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
Oh yeah, they are totally supposed to be mashups of dozens of legends/myths/religions/etc.
Okay, that's a fair cop. I was assuming that everyone involved in the conversation had read enough of the books to have examples of my conclusion.
On a more recreational front, an old college buddy just randomly mailed me a copy of book 1 of Usagi Yojimbo, for which I am totally stoked.
I'm very confused by this question. What part of what book are you on again?
No, you assumed everyone had come to the same conclusions as you. Big difference.
Some authors, after you read the first couple of books of a series, you think "ok, I know which characters they'll save, or how they'll make the plot" or other things. No. All I know is A) people are going to die and B) at least some of them will be someone you really like.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
I'm in the epilogue of Towers of Midnight. This one was really a good time, and I'm looking forward to Tarmon Gaidon. :^:
Yeah. I don't think there's any consensus on what the significance of many events was. For example, This American Life has a whole episode that portrays guys(Magnataur hedge fund) doing almost exactly the same as Michael Lewis's hedge fund guys and they're talked about as evil scum of the earth motherfuckers. It's hard to assess a lot of the groups. The most agreed upon that I've seen were, stupid ratings agencies who blindly trusted the giant banks packaging the CDOs and the banks who lied about the contents of the CDOs. Now, I haven't read EConned but I'm guessing it's going to argue that the CDOs existed because of a policymaker initiative that decided everyone should be able to own a house and this incentivized banks to create subprime mortgages which allowed for the creation of CDOs, which I think is accurate cause-and-effect. I would however think that it was unintentional cause-and-effect born from ignorance rather than malice. The massive CDOs and subsequent collapse I would like to subscribe wholly to malice, but it seems fairly obvious that even a good chunk of the people packaging and managing the CDOs didn't have a clue what they were doing. There seems to be reasonable evidence the key drivers for them were acting out of self-interest/greed though.
It's not. It's really quite wrong.
Subprime mortgages and their various derivatives are basically entirely private sector and driven by the desire for new investment opportunities.
The policy you can basically trace it back to is low interest rates being used to encourage investment. Then all you have to do is not regulate that market and this shit happens naturally.
Of course, self-centred ignorance and/or lack of caring in order to line your own pocket is essentially indistinguishable from malice.
Also, it's not really just subprime home loans that created the crisis. That was a bubble, but what turned it into a disaster was the deregulations (mostly from Clinton, although Bush certainly helped) that allowed banks and pseudo-banks to create opaque bundles, get the ratings agency to give them triple-A's, trade them, and then leveraging even more on the phony worth of those bundles. It turned a fairly moderate bubble into a HUGE one, and just as bad, thanks to the way they were packaged nobody even knew who was holding the toxic loans and who was financially healthy, so suddenly EVERYONE was getting denied any credit.
Banks and financial institutions are very, very good at money. They knew exactly what they were doing, and lawmakers were most definitely not holding a gun to their head to force them to make subprime loans. It was the banks that lobbied to allow it in the first place. And then they got bailed out! The finance industry most definitely understands public risk and private profits, and they make their decisions accordingly.
2. When he blows up at the Maer's wife.
Decided to reread the WoT series, as I haven't read any of Sanderson's books. About halfway through the first one.
My fever dreams as I was drifting off to sleep while finishing Towers of Midnight gave me the most awful and convoluted cliffhanger version of Tarmon Gaidon. Crisis on Infinite Worlds shit, convoluted and tedious like fever dreams always are.
They aren't necessarily well liked, but they are very interesting. Lots of great ideas. Penrose is currently unfinished - it concerns a world of Robots and a war waged by a conquering robot nation, The Watcher is finished and is definitely my favorite, I love the series (though other do not) - it's a meditation on simulation vs reality, Von Neumann machines, AI/human interaction and self-determination. The second book, Capacity is quite chilling.
Blindsight by Peter Watts cannot be recommended enough. The Rifters trilogy, not so much. There are two really interesting themes throughout Rifters (again, AI/Human interaction and self-determination) but it is hampered by being long and pointless and having an exceptionally unlikable and inscrutable protagonist.
The Brent Weeks books are definitely worth a read.
Jack Womack (for example Ambient) is really grim cyberpunk, though is definitely more punk than cyber. He's listed as one of Gibson's favourite authors.
Flotsam and Placebo are books 1 and 2 of Jaiden Glenndenning's A Tangled Knotwork which are really good, but hard to find - I think they were somewhat self-published or something. They're a really complicated retelling of various Celtic mythologies.
I mentioned Godplayers and K-Machines earlier in the thread, and we proceeded to dig up some really embarrassing responses to Amazon reviews from the author. Despite this, they're chock full of interesting ideas (but the occasional terrible dialogue). It's multi-universe, high concept, philosophy/high level physics/mysticism mashup with a number of mysteries throughout. Those who have liked it have compared it with the Chronicles of Amber.
Christopher Farnsworth's Nathaniel Cade books - The President's Vampire and Blood Oath are contemporary fantasy/action/mystery/thrillers which quite strongly reminds me of Hellboy.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
The situation with Magnataur was actually different than anything presented in The Big Short, in that, IIRC, Magnataur was tasked with selecting the mortgages that would go into their CDO. They then selected the riskiest ones, sold it, shorted it, and made a ton of money when it inveitably blew up. That requires considerably more malice than just shorting, which is what all the main players in Big Short were doing (again, that's just going by memory). As far as the book itself is concerned, I never felt like it's intent was to lay blame anywhere, but just to give the layman an idea of the role credit default swaps played.
Dresden Files, Gaunt's Ghosts, Codex Alera, Gotrek & Felix, Night Angel Trilogy.
The first in the Rifters trilogy, fyi. Clearly necroSYS enjoyed it better than I.
@Medium Dave
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
He writes a bunch of other series too, but the only one I've read is kind of a james bond rip off with magic and elves and stuff. It's not bad and it's not like the author tries to hide what he got his source material from. the book tiles are things like " the spy who haunted me" or "Daemons are forever." The first line I read was "The names Bond, Shaman Bond.", Which I'll admit was kinda off-putting but if you get past that it is not so bad.