Posts

• Bogart Streetwise Hercules Registered User, Moderator mod

  June 2015

  Finally reading A Canticle For Leibowitz. I was expecting something a little drier, and am very pleased to find a rich vein of humour.

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  +10
• Jacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod

  June 2015

  Bogart wrote: »

  Finally reading A Canticle For Leibowitz. I was expecting something a little drier, and am very pleased to find a rich vein of humour.

  
  It's definitely more stylish than you'd expect of a book about the post-apocalypse written in the 1950s.

  

  +6
• RMS Oceanic Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Reading list does not have To Kill a Mockingbird. This needs corrected!
  
  On slightly less firm ground, what does the thread think of some HP Lovecraft? I know he drowns in purple prose and has some problematic attitudes as hilariously revealed in the inspiration behind Innsmouth, but I really enjoy The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness, the former for the mystery and the latter for the sheer atmosphere he conjures.

  +1
• Mike Danger "Diane..." a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  I'm currently reading Gormenghast, but I'm only a few pages in. I'm surprised how much of Titus Groan I remember.

  Steam: Mike Danger | PSN/NNID: remadeking | 3DS: 2079-9204-4075
  

  0
• Bogart Streetwise Hercules Registered User, Moderator mod

  June 2015

  Sometimes Lovecraft's stuff is unreadable and awful, and he is rarely ever underwriting anything, but in his best stuff he gets across, through some literary alchemy I can't actually detect, an atmosphere of alien, unknowable, nihilistic evil that lurks on the outskirts of consciousness that no one else can replicate. He's often a terrible, racist writer who also manages to create some of the most disturbing, influential fiction ever made.

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  +9
• Bogart Streetwise Hercules Registered User, Moderator mod

  June 2015

  I can heartily recommend INJ Culbard's comic book adaptations of Lovecraft's stories. He's also just done The King In Yellow.

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  +1
• RMS Oceanic Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Bogart wrote: »

  I can heartily recommend INJ Culbard's comic book adaptations of Lovecraft's stories. He's also just done The King In Yellow.

  
  I have his Mountains of Madness, Charles Dexter Ward and Shadow out of Time. They are great.
  
  In non-fiction I've started listening to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I could wait until the middle of next year to give you my thoughts, but a peak at the contents is interesting how outside the Byzantine Empire the later volumes looks like a more general history of Medieval Europe.

  0
• Phillishere Registered User regular

  June 2015

  RMS Oceanic wrote: »

  Bogart wrote: »

  I can heartily recommend INJ Culbard's comic book adaptations of Lovecraft's stories. He's also just done The King In Yellow.

  
  I have his Mountains of Madness, Charles Dexter Ward and Shadow out of Time. They are great.
  
  In non-fiction I've started listening to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I could wait until the middle of next year to give you my thoughts, but a peak at the contents is interesting how outside the Byzantine Empire the later volumes looks like a more general history of Medieval Europe.

  
  A really good companion volume to this is Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire. It's not written as a direct response to Gibbons - although he does touch on how far archaeology and modern systems of political and cultural analysis have taken the understanding of Rome since his day. What I found fascinating was Heather's framework for understanding the Roman Empire, especially the late empire.
  
  Essentially, he said the key to understanding Rome was to frame it as the ancestor of the modern totalitarian despotisms. All of the written accounts have to be taken as propaganda, and any real historical analysis needs to take into account discoveries made in the last century from analyzing things like gravestones, account books and coinage. He uses the case of a major battle at Frankfurt as an example.
  
  In the Roman written records, Frankfurt was a massive Roman victory where the enemy was crushed. Digs at the sites, however, show that the Germanic fort at Frankfurt was not sacked, but showed signs of growth and prosperity. Roman records from after the battle - backed up by archaeological evidence - show that the Romans were actually sending massive shipments of grain to the fort after the battle.
  
  If you read the records like Gibbons did, you see the Romans dominating the area and start to see the decline as some sort of loss of virtue within Rome. If you put all the pieces together like modern historians, you see that the Romans lost and were paying tribute to the Franks, while declaring their great victory back home in the same way that the Nazis declared victory every time they lost on the Eastern Front.
  
  Really interesting stuff.

  +6
• tyrannus i am not fat Registered User regular

  June 2015

  I just bought Dune! I'm about to read this thing but holy shit I didn't know this thing could also be used as a floation device
  
  it's gigantic.

  +4
• Phillishere Registered User regular

  June 2015

  On The Goblin Emperor, I ended up liking it once I wrapped my head around the fact that it was essentially a fantasy Jane Austen novel - more interested in questions of manners and propriety than actions scenes. Its pretty unique in the genre, and I found myself quite enjoying it once I had settled in.
  
  If I had one major complaint, it felt like all of the conflicts wrapped up too neatly. Part of this comes from the feeling I got that this was the start of the series, and the book's main goal was to introduce the cast of characters and the setting, while hinting at the major problems coming down the line.

  0
• AManFromEarth Let's get to twerk! The King in the SwampRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  Jacobkosh wrote: »

  Bogart wrote: »

  Finally reading A Canticle For Leibowitz. I was expecting something a little drier, and am very pleased to find a rich vein of humour.

  
  It's definitely more stylish than you'd expect of a book about the post-apocalypse written in the 1950s.

  
  Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is the sequel. Walter Miller killed himself in the 1990s before it was finish, but using copious notes it was completed and published. It is not as good as Canticle, but still worth reading. It takes place shortly after the second section of Canticle, about 70 years or so and follows a crusade led by "The Red Deacon" Cardinal Brownpony and an imminently fallible monk from St Leibowitz's, Br Blacktooth St George. It is a very different tone from Canticle, but it is in many ways more human. You get inside Blacktooth's head as he struggles with faith in God, faith in the church, faith in Brownpony, and faith in himself. You also get a lot more development of the world of post apocalyptic North America that I find really benefits the later chapters of Canticle on a reread.
  
  There's a war, mutants, a couple coups, but the heart of the story is something very special. If you like Canticle, give it a go.

  

  +2
• DiannaoChong Registered User regular

  June 2015

  I started reading the Black Company books on recommendation of a dedicated thread that has since died. Really enjoyed the first book. I only read when I am tired, so 1-2 setups/descriptions really confused me and I couldnt decipher what the author was saying. I really enjoyed the modern style dialog and writing for fantasy setting. I hate any setting that feels like it cant make a fantasy world without having 15 consonants and apostrophes in every name.
  
  I'm halfway through the second book. The second book is set up so strangely that I don't know what to think. The crossing stories make it like a less interesting fantasy version of Snatch.

  

  0
• Iolo iolo Registered User regular

  June 2015 edited June 2015

  AManFromEarth wrote: »

  Jacobkosh wrote: »

  Bogart wrote: »

  Finally reading A Canticle For Leibowitz. I was expecting something a little drier, and am very pleased to find a rich vein of humour.

  
  It's definitely more stylish than you'd expect of a book about the post-apocalypse written in the 1950s.

  
  Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is the sequel. Walter Miller killed himself in the 1990s before it was finish, but using copious notes it was completed and published. It is not as good as Canticle, but still worth reading. It takes place shortly after the second section of Canticle, about 70 years or so and follows a crusade led by "The Red Deacon" Cardinal Brownpony and an imminently fallible monk from St Leibowitz's, Br Blacktooth St George. It is a very different tone from Canticle, but it is in many ways more human. You get inside Blacktooth's head as he struggles with faith in God, faith in the church, faith in Brownpony, and faith in himself. You also get a lot more development of the world of post apocalyptic North America that I find really benefits the later chapters of Canticle on a reread.
  
  There's a war, mutants, a couple coups, but the heart of the story is something very special. If you like Canticle, give it a go.

  
  Is the sequel really worth reading? I'm a huge, huge Canticle fan, but looking into people's thoughts about Wild Horse Woman had returned almost uniformly negative results.
  
  Canticle is such a singular work that I'm afraid reading a bad novel in that universe would almost be distasteful, you know? Like midichlorians. I don't really feel the need to just explore more of the world in the way I would with like Hugh Howey's post-apocalyptic America or China Mieville's Bas Lag if the story's not all there.
  
  Hm. I kind of answered my own question there...

  Iolo on June 2015

  Lt. Iolo's First Day
  Steam profile.
  Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2

  0
• Loren Michael Registered User regular

  June 2015

  I just posted this in chat, sorry to spam but I just noticed this far more appropriate thread: help me out, chat! I'm trying to find some books for a Chinese kid, 15 years old, can have a decent conversation about a lot of things but needs to start reading, and textbooks are boring
  
  I have an essentially unlimited budget and an Amazon account
  
  he likes The Walking Dead TV show, so I figured I'd hook him up with the comic, maybe get him intro'd to decent American comics with Ultimate X-Men and Ultimate Spider-Man...
  
  what else is out there? Anything decent young-adult-wise that hasn't already been made into a movie that he's probably seen?

  
  

  0
• AManFromEarth Let's get to twerk! The King in the SwampRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  Iolo wrote: »

  AManFromEarth wrote: »

  Jacobkosh wrote: »

  Bogart wrote: »

  Finally reading A Canticle For Leibowitz. I was expecting something a little drier, and am very pleased to find a rich vein of humour.

  
  It's definitely more stylish than you'd expect of a book about the post-apocalypse written in the 1950s.

  
  Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman is the sequel. Walter Miller killed himself in the 1990s before it was finish, but using copious notes it was completed and published. It is not as good as Canticle, but still worth reading. It takes place shortly after the second section of Canticle, about 70 years or so and follows a crusade led by "The Red Deacon" Cardinal Brownpony and an imminently fallible monk from St Leibowitz's, Br Blacktooth St George. It is a very different tone from Canticle, but it is in many ways more human. You get inside Blacktooth's head as he struggles with faith in God, faith in the church, faith in Brownpony, and faith in himself. You also get a lot more development of the world of post apocalyptic North America that I find really benefits the later chapters of Canticle on a reread.
  
  There's a war, mutants, a couple coups, but the heart of the story is something very special. If you like Canticle, give it a go.

  
  Is the sequel really worth reading? I'm a huge, huge Canticle fan, but looking into people's thoughts about Wild Horse Woman had returned almost uniformly negative results.
  
  Canticle is such a singular work that I'm afraid reading a bad novel in that universe would almost be distasteful, you know? Like midichlorians. I don't really feel the need to just explore more of the world in the way I would with like Hugh Howey's post-apocalyptic America or Chine Mieville's Bas Lag if the story's not all there.
  
  Hm. I kind of answered my own question there...

  
  It's not really a bad novel, but it's a very different book from Canticle.
  
  I liked it, but I don't like it as much as Canticle.
  
  It is a much more traditionally structured book than Canticle, and a very different experience. If you keep that in mind when you start I think you have a better time of it.

  

  0
• RMS Oceanic Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Phillishere wrote: »

  RMS Oceanic wrote: »

  Bogart wrote: »

  I can heartily recommend INJ Culbard's comic book adaptations of Lovecraft's stories. He's also just done The King In Yellow.

  
  I have his Mountains of Madness, Charles Dexter Ward and Shadow out of Time. They are great.
  
  In non-fiction I've started listening to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I could wait until the middle of next year to give you my thoughts, but a peak at the contents is interesting how outside the Byzantine Empire the later volumes looks like a more general history of Medieval Europe.

  
  A really good companion volume to this is Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire. It's not written as a direct response to Gibbons - although he does touch on how far archaeology and modern systems of political and cultural analysis have taken the understanding of Rome since his day. What I found fascinating was Heather's framework for understanding the Roman Empire, especially the late empire.
  
  Essentially, he said the key to understanding Rome was to frame it as the ancestor of the modern totalitarian despotisms. All of the written accounts have to be taken as propaganda, and any real historical analysis needs to take into account discoveries made in the last century from analyzing things like gravestones, account books and coinage. He uses the case of a major battle at Frankfurt as an example.
  
  In the Roman written records, Frankfurt was a massive Roman victory where the enemy was crushed. Digs at the sites, however, show that the Germanic fort at Frankfurt was not sacked, but showed signs of growth and prosperity. Roman records from after the battle - backed up by archaeological evidence - show that the Romans were actually sending massive shipments of grain to the fort after the battle.
  
  If you read the records like Gibbons did, you see the Romans dominating the area and start to see the decline as some sort of loss of virtue within Rome. If you put all the pieces together like modern historians, you see that the Romans lost and were paying tribute to the Franks, while declaring their great victory back home in the same way that the Nazis declared victory every time they lost on the Eastern Front.
  
  Really interesting stuff.

  
  Yeah, I've been following the History of Rome podcast, which is what turned me on to Decline, and "history is written by the winners/side who writes at all" is a theme I'm aware of. Like the story of Valerian's capture by the Sassanid's: Persia has him captured after the battle, Rome has him lured to the Sassanid court under false pretenses and seized. Of the two, I know which is more likely. Especially after Caracalla's shenanigans half a century earlier.

  0
• nexuscrawler Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Reading list lacks Jeff vandermeers southern reach trilogy

  +1
• JRPGMasterPlayer Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Hello, I'm a long time reader first time poster. I was wondering if anyone could figure out these books for me.
  
  1) The first book is a story where Good has finally triumphed over evil but the world becomes unbalanced and therefore the heroes in this book are a band of evil heroes who try to restore the balance and in the end released evil in the world. This was a fantasy book with dragons and I remember the title had a Knight on its cover.
  
  2) The second book is actually a series of 3 books. It stars an African hero, I think the writer based the hero on a Kenyan tribal warrior, who tries to save to world. All I remember was that there was a pirate type character who banded towards them to save the world. The hero might or might not be a wizard and I remember a scene where they enter a Djinns house and he binds them to the floor where they are sitting. I think the hero was based on the Massai.
  
  If anyone could remember which books these were, I'd appreciate it. Thank you!

  0
• RiemannLives Registered User regular

  June 2015

  RMS Oceanic wrote: »

  Reading list does not have To Kill a Mockingbird. This needs corrected!
  
  On slightly less firm ground, what does the thread think of some HP Lovecraft? I know he drowns in purple prose and has some problematic attitudes as hilariously revealed in the inspiration behind Innsmouth, but I really enjoy The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness, the former for the mystery and the latter for the sheer atmosphere he conjures.

  
  "problematic" doesn't even begin to cover it in a lot of cases (not just Innsmouth)
  
  that said I love me some Lovecraft. My favorite is Shadow out of Time followed by At the Mountains of Madness.

  Attacked by tweeeeeeees!
  

  +2
• CroakerBC TorontoRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  Phillishere wrote: »

  RMS Oceanic wrote: »

  Bogart wrote: »

  I can heartily recommend INJ Culbard's comic book adaptations of Lovecraft's stories. He's also just done The King In Yellow.

  
  I have his Mountains of Madness, Charles Dexter Ward and Shadow out of Time. They are great.
  
  In non-fiction I've started listening to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I could wait until the middle of next year to give you my thoughts, but a peak at the contents is interesting how outside the Byzantine Empire the later volumes looks like a more general history of Medieval Europe.

  
  A really good companion volume to this is Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire. It's not written as a direct response to Gibbons - although he does touch on how far archaeology and modern systems of political and cultural analysis have taken the understanding of Rome since his day. What I found fascinating was Heather's framework for understanding the Roman Empire, especially the late empire.
  
  Essentially, he said the key to understanding Rome was to frame it as the ancestor of the modern totalitarian despotisms. All of the written accounts have to be taken as propaganda, and any real historical analysis needs to take into account discoveries made in the last century from analyzing things like gravestones, account books and coinage. He uses the case of a major battle at Frankfurt as an example.
  
  In the Roman written records, Frankfurt was a massive Roman victory where the enemy was crushed. Digs at the sites, however, show that the Germanic fort at Frankfurt was not sacked, but showed signs of growth and prosperity. Roman records from after the battle - backed up by archaeological evidence - show that the Romans were actually sending massive shipments of grain to the fort after the battle.
  
  If you read the records like Gibbons did, you see the Romans dominating the area and start to see the decline as some sort of loss of virtue within Rome. If you put all the pieces together like modern historians, you see that the Romans lost and were paying tribute to the Franks, while declaring their great victory back home in the same way that the Nazis declared victory every time they lost on the Eastern Front.
  
  Really interesting stuff.

  
  I always quite liked Peter Heather, but given that he and one of my old supervisors had something of an

  JRPGMasterPlayer wrote: »

  Hello, I'm a long time reader first time poster. I was wondering if anyone could figure out these books for me.
  
  1) The first book is a story where Good has finally triumphed over evil but the world becomes unbalanced and therefore the heroes in this book are a band of evil heroes who try to restore the balance and in the end released evil in the world. This was a fantasy book with dragons and I remember the title had a Knight on its cover.
  
  2) The second book is actually a series of 3 books. It stars an African hero, I think the writer based the hero on a Kenyan tribal warrior, who tries to save to world. All I remember was that there was a pirate type character who banded towards them to save the world. The hero might or might not be a wizard and I remember a scene where they enter a Djinns house and he binds them to the floor where they are sitting. I think the hero was based on the Massai.
  
  If anyone could remember which books these were, I'd appreciate it. Thank you!

  
  The first one sounds a lot like "Villains by Necessity" By Eve Forward.

  
  
  Goodreads
  
  SF&F Reviews blog

  0
• zakkiel Registered User regular

  June 2015

  So Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel is now a BBC miniseries. The first episode is available free from Amazon (even without prime), and it is remarkably good. It so deftly captures the collision between Austenite social comedy and ominous, almost horror-like magic that made the book special. Also, although it is pretty faithful so far, it is much faster paced than the book.

  Account not recoverable. So long.

  +1
• knitdan In ur base Killin ur guysRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  Picked up The Martian from the library and it is right up my alley. I'm roughly a quarter of the way in, and when I got to the part where

  NASA figures out he's still alive

  I just got this giddy feeling.

  “I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
  -Indiana Solo, runner of blades

  +1
• Tomanta Registered User regular

  June 2015

  zakkiel wrote: »

  So Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel is now a BBC miniseries. The first episode is available free from Amazon (even without prime), and it is remarkably good. It so deftly captures the collision between Austenite social comedy and ominous, almost horror-like magic that made the book special. Also, although it is pretty faithful so far, it is much faster paced than the book.

  
  I enjoyed the first episode, and I have tried to read the book twice but the beginning is so slow that I couldn't get very far.
  
  The first episode might have convinced me to give it another try.

  0
• Mahnmut Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Tomanta wrote: »

  zakkiel wrote: »

  So Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel is now a BBC miniseries. The first episode is available free from Amazon (even without prime), and it is remarkably good. It so deftly captures the collision between Austenite social comedy and ominous, almost horror-like magic that made the book special. Also, although it is pretty faithful so far, it is much faster paced than the book.

  
  I enjoyed the first episode, and I have tried to read the book twice but the beginning is so slow that I couldn't get very far.
  
  The first episode might have convinced me to give it another try.

  
  Big fan of the book, and I liked the first episode pretty well. I was worried that you'd lose a lot just from not having the faux-Austen narrator, but I think 'BBC period miniseries' is a firm enough genre that you get some of the same effect. Huge complaint though at the end:

  The gentleman with thistledown hair is way, way, way off-tone; between the SPECIAL EFFECTS and the ominous, leaden delivery....

  Steam/LoL: Jericho89

  0
• zakkiel Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Mahnmut wrote: »

  Tomanta wrote: »

  zakkiel wrote: »

  So Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel is now a BBC miniseries. The first episode is available free from Amazon (even without prime), and it is remarkably good. It so deftly captures the collision between Austenite social comedy and ominous, almost horror-like magic that made the book special. Also, although it is pretty faithful so far, it is much faster paced than the book.

  
  I enjoyed the first episode, and I have tried to read the book twice but the beginning is so slow that I couldn't get very far.
  
  The first episode might have convinced me to give it another try.

  
  Big fan of the book, and I liked the first episode pretty well. I was worried that you'd lose a lot just from not having the faux-Austen narrator, but I think 'BBC period miniseries' is a firm enough genre that you get some of the same effect. Huge complaint though at the end:

  The gentleman with thistledown hair is way, way, way off-tone; between the SPECIAL EFFECTS and the ominous, leaden delivery....

  
  I would that than unintentionally comic, which is how I suspect he would turn out if they kept him closer to the book.

  Account not recoverable. So long.

  0
• zakkiel Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Read The Library at Mount Char. It's sort of a revenge thriller set in a unique mythology (something of a Babylonian flavor crossed with Lovecraft). The voice and pacing remind me a lot of Idlewild. There's a lot of nice humor mixed in with the grimdark. I enjoyed it all except for the ending, which somehow manages to be both too pat and kind of nonsensical. It doesn't ruin the book at all, though.

  Account not recoverable. So long.

  0
• DevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Finished Seveneves last night and....wow. That was an ending?
  
  I say this as somebody who is typically not the least bit bothered by Stephensons abrupt endings but this really felt like he hit a page limit threw in a paragraph or two about "The Purpose" and called it a day.

  Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish

  +1
• Mojo_Jojo We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourse Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Started reading Middlesex. I feel bad that this has been sat around not being read by me for so long

  Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule

  0
• altid Registered User regular

  June 2015

  No Tolkien in the recommended list?
  
  Started re-reading game of thrones recently. Planning on mixing other books in between through rather than a straight re-read of all 5 in a row.

  0
• Bogart Streetwise Hercules Registered User, Moderator mod

  June 2015

  Possibly Tolkien in a recommended list of fantasy novels would be redundant.

  Twitter Goodreads
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  +3
• Mojo_Jojo We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourse Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Also, you read Tolkien because he was seminal, most of his books are a real slog.

  Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule

  +4
• Shadowhope Baa. Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Mojo_Jojo wrote: »

  Also, you read Tolkien because he was seminal, most of his books are a real slog.

  
  Still better far, far than the movies based on what he wrote.

  Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.

  0
• Jacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod

  June 2015

  Mojo_Jojo wrote: »

  Also, you read Tolkien because he was seminal, most of his books are a real slog.

  
  I am pretty sure I read Tolkien because I dearly love the prosody, the characterizations, the action of the plot and the emotions it stirs in me. It is certainly true that their appeal may be lost on the sort of person who wants nine volumes of detailed exegesis of fantasy magic systems, though, or people who have strict mayhem-per-page quotas that need meeting.

  

  +16
• Jacobkosh Gamble a stamp. I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod

  June 2015

  Bogart wrote: »

  Possibly Tolkien in a recommended list of fantasy novels would be redundant.

  
  This was my thinking but I'll put it in because I really ought not take anything for granted on this forum.

  

  0
• A Dabble Of Thelonius It has been a doozy of a dayRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  I guess I r just too dumb to enjoy Tolkien. Gotta go read explosions now
  
  
  
  ...
  

  
  Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan

  0
• CroakerBC TorontoRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  Jacobkosh wrote: »

  Mojo_Jojo wrote: »

  Also, you read Tolkien because he was seminal, most of his books are a real slog.

  
  I am pretty sure I read Tolkien because I dearly love the prosody, the characterizations, the action of the plot and the emotions it stirs in me. It is certainly true that their appeal may be lost on the sort of person who wants nine volumes of detailed exegesis of fantasy magic systems, though, or people who have strict mayhem-per-page quotas that need meeting.

  
  I really want some sort of graphing of mayhem-per-page across fantasy authors now.
  To Google Analytics!

  
  
  Goodreads
  
  SF&F Reviews blog

  0
• shryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular

  June 2015

  Jacobkosh wrote: »

  Mojo_Jojo wrote: »

  Also, you read Tolkien because he was seminal, most of his books are a real slog.

  
  I am pretty sure I read Tolkien because I dearly love the prosody, the characterizations, the action of the plot and the emotions it stirs in me. It is certainly true that their appeal may be lost on the sort of person who wants nine volumes of detailed exegesis of fantasy magic systems, though, or people who have strict mayhem-per-page quotas that need meeting.

  
  I think he's a bit of both.
  
  Funny thing rereading LOTR a little while ago:
  The flight from Rivendell sequence that is the best part of the FOTR movie and the movie trilogy in general?
  Also one of the best parts of the book series and for exactly the same reason.

  0
• Grudge blessed is the mind too small for doubtRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  Speaking of challenging fantasy, I would really like to see R. Scott Bakkers Prince of Nothing series in the recommended reading list. They're maybe not for newcomers to the genre, but if you want cerebral fantasy, I'd say they're almost up there with Book of the New Sun. Plus, phalluses.
  
  (Btw, I enjoyed Tolkien immensely, which is why I re-read LoTR every summer through ages 10-20. It belongs in the list for many reasons.)

  +2
• shryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular

  June 2015 edited June 2015

  Huh, I thought that was on the list already but you are right.

  shryke on June 2015

  0
• CroakerBC TorontoRegistered User regular

  June 2015

  Finally started Lawrence's The Liar's Key on the commute this morning, and it already has a nice aura of menace mixed with humour going on.

  
  
  Goodreads
  
  SF&F Reviews blog

  +1