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The D&D [Book] Thread
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Thanks, but I've read them. Anything older I've probably read, or tried and disliked. It's modern literatchoor that I never read.
but then noone would ever read Dune!
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hmmm
can't much help there. I tried to stay away from modern things as much as possible at school. the on that crosses my mind id "The Secret Agent" by Joseph Conrad. Which is oddly enough free on kindle!
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My God it's brilliant.
Thanks again - although that's Modernist, not modern. And, sadly, read it, coz old dead bloke. Read most of the old dead blokes, except for the truly classical period that BobCesca is an expert on. I should read more of that too, I think.
Anyway, my friend recommended Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee), Everything Is Illuminated (Foer) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz).
Anyone got any opinions on any of them?
The thing to remember about Anne Rice is that the book that everyone says is the best thing she wrote was appalling, self-indulgent, whiny, homoerotic-envy trash that I literally, physically threw into the trash in disgust after forcing myself to get about a quarter way through it.
Whereas GRRM writes stories that are actually good to read and has characters that I wouldn't rather kill myself than read one more word of their dialogue.
I guess what I'm saying is, it doesn't matter.
Ain't nothin' wrong with reading a story and going, "I bet I could do this, but better"
Well, as long as you do. If you don't then you're just ripping them off.
Haven't read "Waiting for the Barbarians", but "Everything is Illuminated" is a really good book that left a strong impression, and I say that as someone who has sworn not to read/watch any stories about the holocaust anymore, since the topic is so prevalent in German culture and it is too depressing to read about it again and again.
"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is absolutely fantastic. It is also very dark in places, but it deserves all the praise it got, including the Pulitzer.
It's one of my favorite books I read in the last couple of years.
Are you talking about Cry to Heaven?
I enjoyed it a lot. Or you're talking about Interview With A Vampire?
Either way, enjoyable reads, homoeroticism yay.
By about page 120, I just wanted him to be properly dead. Not undead. Just dead. I've never read a protagonist that I despised more.
I picked up Jacob De Zoet for exactly that reason and loved it. Read it twice in the span of a few months and then passed it on to my parents who also enjoyed it. I really need to get around to checking out Cloud Atlas sometime soon.
I'm currently about halfway through Winter in Madrid by C. J. Sansom which mom loaned me at Christmas. It's competently written and I'm finding the plot interesting but I can't help but be a bit disappointed because a stupid review blurb inside the front cover compared it to Carlos Ruiz Zafon's stuff. The only similarity I see is the setting (Spain, after the civil war). This guy writes well but he's no Zafon.
Have you read other Banks/Culture stuff? I'm wondering how this book compares to others he's done. I'm a big fan of Banks, but his past several books I haven't like very much.
Sansom does, on the other hand, do an excellent range of well researched mystery novels set during the reformation (see his Dissolution as a starting point). 'Winter in Madrid' was a bit of a departure for him...
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I enjoyed his other recent stuff well enough but I do agree Matter and Surface Detail weren't great. But this recent one reminds me a lot more of Excession and Look to Windward so I hope it's indicative of future stuff.
Rapidly followed by "Now watch this". That entire conversation/related scene is awesome.
Thought the ending was a bit of a downer though, too obvious.
I'm really enjoying the book so far. The pace is right where I'm at right now, since I haven't been doing a lot of reading lately, and the setting and technology is really fun to learn about.
CJ Cherryh's Alliance/Union books are great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._J._Cherryh_bibliography#The_Alliance-Union_universe
Rimrunners and Heavy Time are my favourites.
Stephen Donaldson's Gap Series have some of the grittiest, greasiest, shittiest spaceship action ever, and I love them, but they have some weird scenes of sex and/or violence (not exploitative, just dark).
The Forever War.
I need to think to remember more gritty ones.
Yeah, I thought of those too, but decided they had too many field projectors and black hole generators, and not enough 'grease'.
Modern writers like Vernor Vinge or Iain M Banks went off my list for the same reason.
David Drake's Lt. Leary series is basically Space Aubrey/Maturin including crew doing space sail rigging and grimy jobs.
The Miles Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold. I recommend those a lot because people keep living and dying all over the world without having read them and it is unacceptable. They're not quite gritty in a Star Wars sense - they're closer to something like Babylon 5 if it didn't have aliens - but they take place on a much more personal scale than most space SF.
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I'm actually kind of curious though, does anyone else find her female characters pretty meh? I mean Miles may always win, but his personality also causes him problems, and there's a big wide swath of memorable male supporting characters. But then like his mom in everything but Barrayar has never been wrong about a single thing once, ever, and Ekaterin started out OK but has pretty much just devolved into the same thing. It's been at least a few years since I've read most of her stuff, so maybe my memories aren't accurate, but I really can't remember any really interesting complex female characters that she's done.
And I've always loved Cordelia as well.
I dunno, maybe it's just more generally that Bujold tends to let her characters work their way through their issues and end up as mostly well-balanced, healthy individuals. Which tends to mean the older any given character in her universe gets, the less interesting they tend to become (and is, again, why Ivan was so great in the last book, his main issue is that he just wants everyone else to leave him alone)
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
Paul of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (manga) by Hayao Miyazaki
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
I'm really not sure why Guy Gavriel Kay doesn't get more play/recognition among fantasy fans. A friend of mine has been telling me to read Tigana for a few years and I finally got around to it. It's brilliant! Granted I'm only halfway through, but I'm really loving the setting, characters, plot...even the names are refreshing (based on Italian naming conventions, so seems new and different compared to Tolkien/British names which dominate the genre). Although I have a ways to go, I'd recommend it to any fantasy buffs. There's even a group of supernatural beings known as Others that a small group of men and women called the Night Walkers must fight off so that they don't sweep over the land and destroy humanity. Sounds like George R. R. Martin read Tigana before coming up with the Others and the Night Watch to me ;)
Anyway, Tigana is fantastic so far! Unpredictable characters and beautifully written prose that really paints a picture of what's happening.
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Lensmen is the mother of all space age Sci-fi.
How did you like Zafón?
EDIT: Holy Reaper, the Geth loves Space Opera!
His prose in Spanish is full of, hum, "high brow" vocabulary, lots of less trivial nouns and adjectives, so I do agree it's best to wait a bit before plunging in the original. But it's very worthwhile too.
I'll also second the Alliance-Union setting for grease space opera. Hellburner, Heavy Time, and any of her Merchanter books are fairly gritty.
I read the Faded Sun trilogy (in the single volume reprint) by C. J. Cherryh a while back. I thought the first book had promise. I mean it was a pretty extreme case of that thing where a sci-fi or fantasy author will throw tons and tons of unpronouncable names at the reader in order to make their setting seem exotic. But she did it better than most who try to go that way.
The second and third books were a pretty big disappointment though. They certainly weren't bad but really did not live up to the promise of the first book. Very much reminded me of my reaction to reading some L.E. Modesitt: not bad but I really don't feel a desire to buy more by the author.
Are her other books or series better?
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Yes. Faded Sun isn't that good.
Heavy Time is about an asteroid-mining crew. Downbelow Station's about a war and a space station, Cyteen is about genetic engineering, and Pride of Chanur is about a merchant captain that finds an alien (human) stowaway. I'd say those are her best books.