Just wrapped up Republic of Thieves. It's a weird book - if you're not invested in learning all about Sabetha, I don't think the book is going to do a whole lot for you. She very much takes prominence, to the detriment of Lynch actually expanding on the nuances of the various schemes attempted. I actually found myself far more interested in the interlude chapters following the Bastards when they were younger, which had a lot more tension and planning. It reframes the actions of some antagonists from the previous book which defangs them somewhat, and takes Locke's arc in a weird direction.
Also, criminal dearth of Jean.
Still, I enjoyed it - the dialogue and character work continue to be excellent, and it's good to have Lynch back. Hopefully the next book capitalises on some of the seeds he planted in this one.
just finished the way of kings the other day, not bad. I think he could have used a better editor to par the page count down a bit though, the shattered planes stuff went on forever and there should have been more shallan/jansah chapters.
just finished the way of kings the other day, not bad. I think he could have used a better editor to par the page count down a bit though, the shattered planes stuff went on forever and there should have been more shallan/jansah chapters.
A thousand times yes to this. Thankfully the second book apparently focuses on them so that's good.
Don't know if any of you homps read the Johannes Cabal books but the third one just dropped on my Kindle last week
It is a straight-up Lovecraft crossover
They go to Arkham and then to the Dreamlands and now maybe Nyarlathotep is fucking with them?
It's fun stuff but I hope you dig on some Lovecraft
Actually I guess you can't really cross over with the Mythos since so many other people have used it and built upon it, everything just becomes a pastiche? I don't know the terms here
What's the best Lovecraft mythos book I can start with if I've never read any of his previous works?
Call of Cthulhu is his most well-known, but The Shadow Over Innsmouth and At The Mountains of Madness are probably his best
(although The Colour Out of Space might be his most effective since it made me more physically uncomfortable than any other text I've come across)
So I dunno if anyone else cares because the writing is strictly YA quality, but the 9th Percy Jackson book from Rick Riordan, House of Hades, dropped this week.
As a lover of myths and legends, that guy is really capable at spinning old fragmented stories into a coherent whole with his own characters and fanmythos. They're not deep reads, and the first two PJ books are very weak reads, but I'd recommend this stuff over Harry Potter literally any day.
And oh my god some of the stuff is impossibly badass and cool and characterful and just plain mythic. He leans a little too hard on the heroes just talking their way out of a situation in a couple of places, but there's some amazing payoffs in House of Hades, from the rest of the series, spoilers about Nico Angelo below.
So the character is the son of Hades, born in the 1940s and displaced in time so he recently reappeared in the modern era. He's one of the most powerful characters in the books, and he's had a chip on his shoulder ever since his sister died.
So in House of Hades he runs into Cupid, who forces him to come out about the fact that he's gay and has an enormous crush on Percy Jackson. It's done really well and there's a ton of feels and I was just really impressed by the whole scene.
For a guy writing with a huge ensemble caste and a ton of recurring characters from a nine book series, Riordan does a really good job highlighting each character and making you invested in their conflicts. If you can stand YA stuff, read these books and this one especially.
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Snowbeati need somethingto kick this thing's ass over the lineRegistered Userregular
not that i have any sort of overweening respect for lovecraft or that i think he's the best writer ever or anything
but this recent thing where hacks take apart classic authors' public domain works so that they can insert their own shitty fanfiction because that's what the kindle crowd reads
not that i have any sort of overweening respect for lovecraft or that i think he's the best writer ever or anything
but this recent thing where hacks take apart classic authors' public domain works so that they can insert their own shitty fanfiction because that's what the kindle crowd reads
it's a little gross
Well Jonathan Howard is actually a pretty solid genre fiction writer and actually gets his stuff published like, in paper form, and the previous two books have not had any element of pastiche
But as far as Lovecraft goes, he and his buddies all wrote in each other's worlds anyway and it pretty quickly became a big literary sandbox to play around in, so I don't have a problem with that so much, but I get what you mean in a general sense
What I really fucking hate are shitty Sherlock Holmes fanfics
Like, I can't find the title but there's a whole series where an older Holmes teams up with a plucky young girl detective who is a total author self-insert and then they get married and it's all just kinda weird and sad
Mary Russell is the protagonist of a series of detective novels by Laurie R. King based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. After her parents and brother are killed in a car crash, 15-year-old Mary returns to the family home on the Sussex Downs. There she meets Sherlock Holmes, who retired twelve years ago in 1903 and has become a beekeeper. He is surprised to find that she shares his talent for deduction, and she becomes both his friend and his apprentice. Later novels upgraded her to wife.
Real answer I think a big element of any "old retired hero" story is to show them without the support and resources they had before, and in Sherlock's case his entire support system was Watson, so he's gotta go
Almost done with Republic of Thieves. Not as good as the other two, but still fun. I agree @Shen on his points. Main gripe in spoilers.
I truly hate when writers decide that a character needs to do some stupid things so they frame it as well they're so madly in love with this other character that they just go full on stupid around them. So yeah, Locke and Sabetha scenes irritate the snot outta me. In fact, I can't remember the last time I've been irritated by parts of a sto wait no I can remember. I got the same feeling in the dark days of reading Wheel of Time with the main characters oh ho ho I cannot hurt a woman even if it would save the world tripe. Granted that's not the same as what;s in RoT, but it provoked the same brain crawl reaction from me.
Lost Salientblink twiceif you'd like me to mercy kill youRegistered Userregular
Wh... What are you talking about GG
Watson is in those books, he's not dead
Also I'm not saying those books are flawless but they're much less "AND NOW THEY ARE IN LOVE BECAUSE I LOVE SHERLOCK HOLMES" than you are implying, and they do a lot of really funy Wold Newton universe stuff with other literary characters. Frankly they're actually pretty damned enjoyable.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
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Lost Salientblink twiceif you'd like me to mercy kill youRegistered Userregular
Although I haven't read the latest two, I went off mysteries for a while.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
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Snowbeati need somethingto kick this thing's ass over the lineRegistered Userregular
still it's a little weird if a nineteen-year-old girl marries the man who partially raised her who is also elderly? despite all of the historical justifications i guess
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Lost Salientblink twiceif you'd like me to mercy kill youRegistered Userregular
He doesn't raise her per se, it's more of a mentor/mentee situation in the early books. But I did say they aren't flawless, and if a relationship with a big age gap is a major issue for you then probably avoid them.
There are certainly some books I don't feel the need to read before judging their worth (Ravaged by a Raptor, for instance), I just feel that people (ahem hem GG) are making the Laurie R. King books out to be these giant piles of steaming shit when in fact they're... they're really not? And I'm saying this as someone who is really really into Sherlockiana. Like, @Grey Ghost have you actually read them? Because there are so many deeply, deeply shitty Sherlock ripoff novels on the shelves that are far worse than these.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
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Snowbeati need somethingto kick this thing's ass over the lineRegistered Userregular
to be fair their summaries don't exactly give them a fair shake
but if i ever run across one in the wild i'll give it a shot
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Lost Salientblink twiceif you'd like me to mercy kill youRegistered Userregular
I mean, you don't have to! They're not for everyone and if you're against any form of pastiche, this certainly falls into that category! I'm just saying that there's a lot of vitriol being aimed at this one series. And I think it's a bit unfair as I actually quite like the series (well, liked, as I said it's been a while and I haven't read the last two), in comparison to other Holmes insert/continuation novels. Which are generally unreadable or very poorly contrived mysteries.
...I fucking hate a poorly constructed mystery novel, which is why I hardly ever manage to find ones that I enjoy.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
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QuirkyLittleTyrantA Mug Featuring Pichu On A CloudRegistered Userregular
I highly recommend the Temeraire series of novels by Naomi Novik (at least the first three because that's all I've got so far so if they suck later I'm sorry).
It's a series about the Napoleonic Wars with dragons written in a style similar to Patrick O'Brian
Also I'm not saying those books are flawless but they're much less "AND NOW THEY ARE IN LOVE BECAUSE I LOVE SHERLOCK HOLMES" than you are implying, and they do a lot of really funy Wold Newton universe stuff with other literary characters. Frankly they're actually pretty damned enjoyable.
Ah, I just didn't see Watson mentioned in that little synopsis and jumped to the conclusion
Hey you guys should read River of Stars by Guy Gavrel Kay
it's fucking brilliant
so so so good
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AwkoAbout to poison the waterhole.Registered Userregular
I just finished reading I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive by Steve Earle.
Other than the use of a few terms and slurs that I'm sure would've been prevalent in the setting, I really enjoyed the story and Earle's writing style.
Blurb
In 1963, ten years after he may have given Hank the morphine shot that killed him, Doc has lost his license. Living in the red-light district of San Antonio, he performs abortions and patches up the odd knife wound to feed his addiction. But when Graciela, a young Mexican immigrant, appears in the neighborhood in search of Doc’s services, miraculous things begin to happen. Everyone she meets is transformed for the better, except, maybe, for Hank’s angry ghost—who isn’t at all pleased to see Doc doing well.
Posts
Whoops.
I would like to reread First Law and the rest of the books, but no time!
it's a short story that can be found here
http://www.apex-magazine.com/tight-little-stitches-in-a-dead-mans-back/
it's fuckin weird and disturbing. after I read it, I was torn between feeling like it was both intriguing and unnecessarily horrible
Also, criminal dearth of Jean.
Still, I enjoyed it - the dialogue and character work continue to be excellent, and it's good to have Lynch back. Hopefully the next book capitalises on some of the seeds he planted in this one.
A thousand times yes to this. Thankfully the second book apparently focuses on them so that's good.
It is a straight-up Lovecraft crossover
They go to Arkham and then to the Dreamlands and now maybe Nyarlathotep is fucking with them?
It's fun stuff but I hope you dig on some Lovecraft
Call of Cthulhu is his most well-known, but The Shadow Over Innsmouth and At The Mountains of Madness are probably his best
(although The Colour Out of Space might be his most effective since it made me more physically uncomfortable than any other text I've come across)
As a lover of myths and legends, that guy is really capable at spinning old fragmented stories into a coherent whole with his own characters and fanmythos. They're not deep reads, and the first two PJ books are very weak reads, but I'd recommend this stuff over Harry Potter literally any day.
And oh my god some of the stuff is impossibly badass and cool and characterful and just plain mythic. He leans a little too hard on the heroes just talking their way out of a situation in a couple of places, but there's some amazing payoffs in House of Hades, from the rest of the series, spoilers about Nico Angelo below.
So in House of Hades he runs into Cupid, who forces him to come out about the fact that he's gay and has an enormous crush on Percy Jackson. It's done really well and there's a ton of feels and I was just really impressed by the whole scene.
For a guy writing with a huge ensemble caste and a ton of recurring characters from a nine book series, Riordan does a really good job highlighting each character and making you invested in their conflicts. If you can stand YA stuff, read these books and this one especially.
not that i have any sort of overweening respect for lovecraft or that i think he's the best writer ever or anything
but this recent thing where hacks take apart classic authors' public domain works so that they can insert their own shitty fanfiction because that's what the kindle crowd reads
it's a little gross
Well Jonathan Howard is actually a pretty solid genre fiction writer and actually gets his stuff published like, in paper form, and the previous two books have not had any element of pastiche
But as far as Lovecraft goes, he and his buddies all wrote in each other's worlds anyway and it pretty quickly became a big literary sandbox to play around in, so I don't have a problem with that so much, but I get what you mean in a general sense
What I really fucking hate are shitty Sherlock Holmes fanfics
fantastic
I haven't read it but I really really want to
I've heard enough about it that it sounds pretty legit
The peak of what a woman can be is only reached when she binds herself to a man, obviously
also it's not totally out of character for sherlock holmes to raise a young girl as his ward and then marry her, nope!!
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
Watson is in those books, he's not dead
Also I'm not saying those books are flawless but they're much less "AND NOW THEY ARE IN LOVE BECAUSE I LOVE SHERLOCK HOLMES" than you are implying, and they do a lot of really funy Wold Newton universe stuff with other literary characters. Frankly they're actually pretty damned enjoyable.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
There are certainly some books I don't feel the need to read before judging their worth (Ravaged by a Raptor, for instance), I just feel that people (ahem hem GG) are making the Laurie R. King books out to be these giant piles of steaming shit when in fact they're... they're really not? And I'm saying this as someone who is really really into Sherlockiana. Like, @Grey Ghost have you actually read them? Because there are so many deeply, deeply shitty Sherlock ripoff novels on the shelves that are far worse than these.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
but if i ever run across one in the wild i'll give it a shot
...I fucking hate a poorly constructed mystery novel, which is why I hardly ever manage to find ones that I enjoy.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
It's a series about the Napoleonic Wars with dragons written in a style similar to Patrick O'Brian
So far they're super awesome!
Steam: ZappRowsdower
Ah, I just didn't see Watson mentioned in that little synopsis and jumped to the conclusion
And of course I haven't read them
it's fucking brilliant
so so so good
Other than the use of a few terms and slurs that I'm sure would've been prevalent in the setting, I really enjoyed the story and Earle's writing style.
Blurb