I've been trying to read The Last Argument of Kings, and it just feels really boring to me. Or maybe boring is the wrong word, but either way its been just a struggle to keep reading, and I think I might just give up.
It's hard to tell because I'm not sure what specifically is bugging you about it, but if you've made it to Last Argument of Kings and still aren't feeling it, then it's probably just not for you. By that point a lot of the rough edges of the first two books and the structure that they need to set up for the 3rd volume to work are over with and those are usually the biggest thing tripping people up about The First Law.
But again, it really depends a lot on what's bugging you. Is it LAoK in particular? Is it just that it hasn't ever grabbed you and you are finally giving up? Hard to say either way without knowing.
If it’s not grabbing you just drop it. It doesn’t get better. He’s a one trick pony and it’s not even that great a trick.
Nah. He's nothing like a one-trick pony and there's plenty of interesting things going on in his works. LAoK itself is just fantastic in how it pulls the series together in unconventional ways.
I'm having a hard time articulating it a little. I feel like the characters grind on me a little. They seem really exaggerated? Like, the whole Ardee arc so far (Open Council vote for King just happened) is really annoying to me, and I feel like I was finally starting to gain an appreciation for Luthar, and now he's back to being a pompous ass, and I hadn't minded it so much when it was obvious he was going to either go ubermench story hero, or brought low and learn a lesson, but now that he's learned the lesson, and is going to go back to the same fuckwad just makes me feel like I wasted energy investing in the character. I guess maybe its that a lot of characters are making decisions that are likely realistic, but are just so dumb and its so aggravating. And the generals up north who are going to sit on their asses, losing the war because they want to be the one in charge or some bullshit?
I guess I just feel like I don't have the energy to buy in if its not going to wow me. There have been some interesting fight scenes, but those are few and far between, there has been some cool magic stuff, but it all gets handwaved. The Shanka and the Gurkish are two issues that clearly need to be handled, and neither are close to a resolution in the "final" book.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I've been trying to read The Last Argument of Kings, and it just feels really boring to me. Or maybe boring is the wrong word, but either way its been just a struggle to keep reading, and I think I might just give up.
It's hard to tell because I'm not sure what specifically is bugging you about it, but if you've made it to Last Argument of Kings and still aren't feeling it, then it's probably just not for you. By that point a lot of the rough edges of the first two books and the structure that they need to set up for the 3rd volume to work are over with and those are usually the biggest thing tripping people up about The First Law.
But again, it really depends a lot on what's bugging you. Is it LAoK in particular? Is it just that it hasn't ever grabbed you and you are finally giving up? Hard to say either way without knowing.
If it’s not grabbing you just drop it. It doesn’t get better. He’s a one trick pony and it’s not even that great a trick.
Nah. He's nothing like a one-trick pony and there's plenty of interesting things going on in his works. LAoK itself is just fantastic in how it pulls the series together in unconventional ways.
I'm having a hard time articulating it a little. I feel like the characters grind on me a little. They seem really exaggerated? Like, the whole Ardee arc so far (Open Council vote for King just happened) is really annoying to me, and I feel like I was finally starting to gain an appreciation for Luthar, and now he's back to being a pompous ass, and I hadn't minded it so much when it was obvious he was going to either go ubermench story hero, or brought low and learn a lesson, but now that he's learned the lesson, and is going to go back to the same fuckwad just makes me feel like I wasted energy investing in the character. I guess maybe its that a lot of characters are making decisions that are likely realistic, but are just so dumb and its so aggravating. And the generals up north who are going to sit on their asses, losing the war because they want to be the one in charge or some bullshit?
I guess I just feel like I don't have the energy to buy in if its not going to wow me. There have been some interesting fight scenes, but those are few and far between, there has been some cool magic stuff, but it all gets handwaved. The Shanka and the Gurkish are two issues that clearly need to be handled, and neither are close to a resolution in the "final" book.
I think this mostly makes sense? I know it can be tough to figure out sometimes why this or that thing is bouncing off you. It's tough to say but I definitely think the resolution will/would come at you in an unexpected way. You may appreciate it or you may despise it though, depending what you want from the story.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Well, for lack of enough self control to just stop reading, I'm still working my way through it. Just past the half way point now.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I read The Blizzard, by Vladimir Sorokin. I hugely enjoyed this odd, aimless little novel. It starts out with a doctor in pince nez looking to rent horses at a waystation to get to another village where he has to deliver a vaccine, but there's a blizzard out.
I sort of doubt anyone's going to read this, since it wasn't even available from amazon HQ and I had to get it from the used+new section, but I'll spoil my description of the book in case you do. It is phantasmagoric and unexpected.
So that set up suggests, we are in 19th century Russian lit (the name The Blizzard is also immediately evocative of the Pushkin short story The Blizzard). Well, ok, that seems like something I want to read...ah, wait, but the doctor is mentioning something about how when he gets there he'll have to visit the graveyard and look out for corpses and oh huh is this a zombie novel? (yes, in that the epidemic is a zombie disease, no in that we see zero zombies and never talk about them; instead sometimes we think about how that wretch Zilberstein with the first part of the vaccine won't be there yet).
All right, so he's looking for a horse but a guy mentions that Crouper over in the other house has a snowmobile. Ah, so...not 19th century huh. "What power?" "Fifty horses" ok, ok
but then
we go to the garage
and
there's a little mini forge for making horseshoes the size of kopeks
and 50 horses the size of partridges who run on a conveyor belt to power the snowmobile
And...then there's about 150 pages of trying to drive from one village to another in a blizzard. They lose the road a lot, and get cold, and stop at a miller's house and fuck his wife, and the miller is about a foot tall, and they watch the state entertainment channel on the radio, and then the next day they meet on the road some kazakh 'vitaminders' and take a future tech drug trip (the drug is a plastic pyramid, and the doctor has a long and vivid vision of being burned alive in a cauldron of hot oil, and then feels great afterwards), and then they run into a dead giant and the snowmobile runner breaks, and they never get to the village
The whole time it's freezing, and there's the sparse russian wilderness, and we're cold and can't see and the doctor is remembering his ex in Berlin and just
Bechdel’s other parental memoir, Are You My Mother, which is a teeny bit less triffic, possibly because it’s a lot about therapy, a subject that fascinates me less than some.
Finished The Last Argument of Kings. It wasn't awful, although I don't expect I'll read more of his stuff.
I wasn't a huge fan of the trilogy (liked it well enough) but before that I read Best Served Cold which I liked way, way more. It's a stand-alone revenge/intrigue story taking place in the world's fantasy version of renaissance Italy.
Later I've also quite enjoyed Red Country, which is a kind of western set in a frontier region.
Both stories are much more focused and low-key than the trilogy. There's a chance that you might be like me and enjoy them despite being meh on the main trilogy.
I think the three stand-alones are on average better written but Last Argument of Kings is such a great ending that it lifts the previous 2 books imo.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I tried to check out the e-book version of Acceptance, having gotten the first two as e-books from my local library, and its telling me the e-book format is no longer available. How the fuck do you "lose" an e-book?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I tried to check out the e-book version of Acceptance, having gotten the first two as e-books from my local library, and its telling me the e-book format is no longer available. How the fuck do you "lose" an e-book?
Agreements with publishers require them to only check an ebook out a certain number of times to match the degradation of physical books
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I tried to check out the e-book version of Acceptance, having gotten the first two as e-books from my local library, and its telling me the e-book format is no longer available. How the fuck do you "lose" an e-book?
Agreements with publishers require them to only check an ebook out a certain number of times to match the degradation of physical books
I think I might have just suffered an aneurysm.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Finished Quantum Thief and was not especially impressed. Kinda felt all over the place. The experience of memories and different civilizations were neat though.
Semiosis is definitely neat, very strange world building. Children of Time is a real good comparison.
I guess, I'm not really into space heists at the moment. Quantium Magician is fine. But the character are well... selfish as hell. They leave a wake of destruction in their path, for ehh... limited amounts of good. It's a good romp.
I am now reading the Ice trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin, and it starts out as a life history of this guy who is born in 1908 and sees his wealthy family killed in the revolution, BUT THEN he goes on an expedition to find a meteorite and the meteorite/Ice tells him that he is one of um 23,000 Children of Light who originally made this earth and he needs to find his brethren to unite and destroy it and start anew, and he knows this when his heart feels another person's heart and they have to be hit in the chest with a hammer made from the meteorite ice in order for their heart to awaken.
And now there's about 20 of them and half of them are working for the cheka because they understand that in order to successfully find the rest of their brethren they have to be successful in society and that means working for the state apparatus. But also they can only eat berries and raw foods, and they only have to sleep 4 hours a night and they can speak heart-to-heart with the other Children of Light and again, what the fuck am I reading
It's super interesting! I love this author. He's really good at having characters derive illogical conclusions with utter certainty from sets of weird circumstances; very mystical.
Semiosis is definitely neat, very strange world building. Children of Time is a real good comparison.
I guess, I'm not really into space heists at the moment. Quantium Magician is fine. But the character are well... selfish as hell. They leave a wake of destruction in their path, for ehh... limited amounts of good. It's a good romp.
I think the amount of good is kinda relative.
Most of their goals are selfish, but they help an entire, generally seemingly decent, civilization break free of essentially being vassals of another.
And as horrific as the Puppets and their civilization, dickbag geneticist might be able to change it for the... I wouldn’t say better but at least less awful. Especially for future Numen.
Finished the Machineries of Empires a little while ago. Overall I found the series disappointing. I felt like there were a lot of big ideas that were kind of hastily explored. I didn't really care about what happened to anyone with the exception of...
...Cheris who became almost a side character in the final book only to come out of no where at the last minute to save the day with some Mathmagic. I also found the overall terribleness of the Empire as being undone by killing just one dude to be fairly ridiculous. Especially when killing the leader of every other faction of the Empire didn't really seem to do too much. But this was an entire empire set up in a system that required Billions if not Trillions of people who were at least complicit if not actively and willingly involved in doing horrible things.
Anyways, over the last week I stumbled across the AMC show 'The Terror' based on Dan Simmons historical horror book of the same name, which I read a few years ago and quite liked. His other books in that sub-genre don't seem to have the same appeal to me right now but I would like to read some modern supernatural horror. Any suggestions?
Finished the Machineries of Empires a little while ago. Overall I found the series disappointing. I felt like there were a lot of big ideas that were kind of hastily explored. I didn't really care about what happened to anyone with the exception of...
...Cheris who became almost a side character in the final book only to come out of no where at the last minute to save the day with some Mathmagic. I also found the overall terribleness of the Empire as being undone by killing just one dude to be fairly ridiculous. Especially when killing the leader of every other faction of the Empire didn't really seem to do too much. But this was an entire empire set up in a system that required Billions if not Trillions of people who were at least complicit if not actively and willingly involved in doing horrible things.
Anyways, over the last week I stumbled across the AMC show 'The Terror' based on Dan Simmons historical horror book of the same name, which I read a few years ago and quite liked. His other books in that sub-genre don't seem to have the same appeal to me right now but I would like to read some modern supernatural horror. Any suggestions?
Cherie Priest's Maplecroft and Chapelwood, which blend Lizzie Borden and Cthulu-esque supernatural investigation may be worth a look. Her Brimstone is good, too.
Teresa Frohock's Los Nefilim, set in the Spanish Civil War, may be worth looking into as well.
Anyone reading Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower? It's fantasy, has gods, is largely second and first person. It's wierd.
I'm surprised it doesn't pass the Bechdel test.
I bought it yesterday but still have to finish my current book before I move over to this one. I’m looking forward to reading it though.
This is discounting the 10 books I read with my 2 year old (she came over with a big smile and wants to copy her 6 year old sister who got 5 books from the library yesterday afternoon and read 3 of them before she got home).
Oh and the bedtime stories.
I love that both my daughters are in to books although when sitting down to breakfast they just sit there with books to the side not saying anything (my wife also did this yesterday as well). Trying to get people ready in the morning is like herding cats.
Anyone reading Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower? It's fantasy, has gods, is largely second and first person. It's wierd.
I'm surprised it doesn't pass the Bechdel test.
I really liked it. A smoother read for me than her other books (which however, big fan).
I thought the two timelines (back in the day, now) balanced each-other real well. One starts out wide-open world-building, the other is a claustrophobic palace drama. The back-and-forth keeps the former tense and the latter palatable, right. And that balance shifts as the backstory catches up and the modern plot boils down to clarity, which is also cool.
The ending felt weird to me but overall I enjoyed it.
Bechel Test...huh. I don't remember any of the gods identifying as a gender so that lops off like half the page count as just N/A as far as gender tests go. The rest, I think, is narrated in the 2nd person with that person being male so I think that structural restraint makes it impossible to pass. Actually...I can see a way it could be passed specifically in this story because of the snake scroll thingy but it'd just make it really creepy.
Good sci-fi authors jumping over to fantasy tend to deliver interestingly weird stuff, if nothing else.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
edited March 2019
I'm really liking Ancillary Mercy so far, I just wish I hadn't waited so long between reading each book. I feel like I can barely remember the first one at this point.
Edit: I finished it. I really liked it. I wish there was more. Maybe some sort of crazy fusion story between Ann Leckie and Yoon Ha Lee...
Brody on
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.
Ellis refers to millennials as Generation Wuss, which sounds like something your dad made up.
...he plays the thinking man’s shock jock, talking about movies with that lush transcendence that enters a man’s voice when he is no longer forced to endure the inconvenience of talking over someone else.
For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.
Ellis refers to millennials as Generation Wuss, which sounds like something your dad made up.
...he plays the thinking man’s shock jock, talking about movies with that lush transcendence that enters a man’s voice when he is no longer forced to endure the inconvenience of talking over someone else.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Last night I finished The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey.
It's the best thing I've read in several years. I had to fight a very strong urge to just go back and read it again. I'm still not sure that I made the right call in not doing that.
It's about a priest in Oakham* taking confessions before the start of lent in the 15th century after a man drowns in the river. That doesn't sound like much of a hook but it works incredibly well, especially as the days are presented in reverse order, so you move backwards away from pancake day and towards the drowning. The resolution of what happened isn't the point, but every day gives every character another layer and makes them real in a way that is incredibly uncommon in any fiction.
So well done Samantha. I'll certainly read more of her stuff.
*confusingly not the one in Rutland but one in Somerset that also apparently exists
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.
Ellis refers to millennials as Generation Wuss, which sounds like something your dad made up.
...he plays the thinking man’s shock jock, talking about movies with that lush transcendence that enters a man’s voice when he is no longer forced to endure the inconvenience of talking over someone else.
She makes a lot of good points. I think it's interesting how a lot of Generation X reacts to current events and their reaction to millennials. I think a lot of it is how they had this idea that the world was bullshit, and they were mopey, angry slackers, and they wanted to tear it all down and make something better, but they were just held down by the man. And they see millennials act to actually change things and it makes them nuts. Like the safe space thing. When the dominant culture pushes you down, you're supposed to go write a book or record an album about how mopey and angry you are at the man not respecting your sad cynical rage, not just gather with some like minded people and set up an area where you can go that you can get away from the dominant culture and do your own thing. How are people supposed to write long, angry, cynical diatribes on materialism and fakeness and record long, rambling rock albums about the shittiness of society when people just go about trying to actually fix things?
For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.
Ellis refers to millennials as Generation Wuss, which sounds like something your dad made up.
...he plays the thinking man’s shock jock, talking about movies with that lush transcendence that enters a man’s voice when he is no longer forced to endure the inconvenience of talking over someone else.
She makes a lot of good points. I think it's interesting how a lot of Generation X reacts to current events and their reaction to millennials. I think a lot of it is how they had this idea that the world was bullshit, and they were mopey, angry slackers, and they wanted to tear it all down and make something better, but they were just held down by the man. And they see millennials act to actually change things and it makes them nuts. Like the safe space thing. When the dominant culture pushes you down, you're supposed to go write a book or record an album about how mopey and angry you are at the man not respecting your sad cynical rage, not just gather with some like minded people and set up an area where you can go that you can get away from the dominant culture and do your own thing. How are people supposed to write long, angry, cynical diatribes on materialism and fakeness and record long, rambling rock albums about the shittiness of society when people just go about trying to actually fix things?
Small addendum to that. In their Gen X viewpoint privileged white kids are supposed to make art about crushing ennui. Anyone else does it is engaging is cheap "identity politics"
I mean she's reviewing one guy's book and not an entire generation of people and also this isn't really the angrily yell at everyone between the ages of 40-54 thread.
For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.
Ellis refers to millennials as Generation Wuss, which sounds like something your dad made up.
...he plays the thinking man’s shock jock, talking about movies with that lush transcendence that enters a man’s voice when he is no longer forced to endure the inconvenience of talking over someone else.
She makes a lot of good points. I think it's interesting how a lot of Generation X reacts to current events and their reaction to millennials. I think a lot of it is how they had this idea that the world was bullshit, and they were mopey, angry slackers, and they wanted to tear it all down and make something better, but they were just held down by the man. And they see millennials act to actually change things and it makes them nuts. Like the safe space thing. When the dominant culture pushes you down, you're supposed to go write a book or record an album about how mopey and angry you are at the man not respecting your sad cynical rage, not just gather with some like minded people and set up an area where you can go that you can get away from the dominant culture and do your own thing. How are people supposed to write long, angry, cynical diatribes on materialism and fakeness and record long, rambling rock albums about the shittiness of society when people just go about trying to actually fix things?
Small addendum to that. In their Gen X viewpoint privileged white kids are supposed to make art about crushing ennui. Anyone else does it is engaging is cheap "identity politics"
Aye. The basic thrust you get of Ellis' complaints from the book is pretty standard. It's basically "these things suck, but these things are ok and the problem with them damn punk kids these days is they are complaining about the things that are ok". It's basically all like "Rich people are corrupt but all this talk about white privilege is just a bunch of bullshit" or whatever other examples you want for either point there.
Reading the full review, it's basically Old Man Yells at Millennial Clouds: The Rambling Book.
I do enjoy the reviewer basically saying that, no, I refuse to make this a big thing and give Ellis his moment in the sun being dunked on on twitter. This shit is more boring then it is offensive.
Anyways. I'm reading the Divine cities Trilogy right now
Kind of turn of the century era colonialism in a world where there used to be supremely magic gods who were killed.
It is so good.
Also, really appreciate how the languages and cultures of the world draw from Slavic and Indian (well, mostly just phonotactics for names tbh) instead of being the 10000th fantasy Britain.
Also also, it's interesting how it's sort of double colonialism - the pseudo slavic culture used to brutally oppress the rest of the world with their living gods as a sort of magic WMDs, until the pseudo-Indian culture killed all the gods with advanced technology and then proceeded to colonize the colonizers.
Some interesting stuff in there about how liberators turn into new imperialists, cycles of violence etc.
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I'm having a hard time articulating it a little. I feel like the characters grind on me a little. They seem really exaggerated? Like, the whole Ardee arc so far (Open Council vote for King just happened) is really annoying to me, and I feel like I was finally starting to gain an appreciation for Luthar, and now he's back to being a pompous ass, and I hadn't minded it so much when it was obvious he was going to either go ubermench story hero, or brought low and learn a lesson, but now that he's learned the lesson, and is going to go back to the same fuckwad just makes me feel like I wasted energy investing in the character. I guess maybe its that a lot of characters are making decisions that are likely realistic, but are just so dumb and its so aggravating. And the generals up north who are going to sit on their asses, losing the war because they want to be the one in charge or some bullshit?
I guess I just feel like I don't have the energy to buy in if its not going to wow me. There have been some interesting fight scenes, but those are few and far between, there has been some cool magic stuff, but it all gets handwaved. The Shanka and the Gurkish are two issues that clearly need to be handled, and neither are close to a resolution in the "final" book.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I think this mostly makes sense? I know it can be tough to figure out sometimes why this or that thing is bouncing off you. It's tough to say but I definitely think the resolution will/would come at you in an unexpected way. You may appreciate it or you may despise it though, depending what you want from the story.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I sort of doubt anyone's going to read this, since it wasn't even available from amazon HQ and I had to get it from the used+new section, but I'll spoil my description of the book in case you do. It is phantasmagoric and unexpected.
All right, so he's looking for a horse but a guy mentions that Crouper over in the other house has a snowmobile. Ah, so...not 19th century huh. "What power?" "Fifty horses" ok, ok
but then
we go to the garage
and
there's a little mini forge for making horseshoes the size of kopeks
and 50 horses the size of partridges who run on a conveyor belt to power the snowmobile
And...then there's about 150 pages of trying to drive from one village to another in a blizzard. They lose the road a lot, and get cold, and stop at a miller's house and fuck his wife, and the miller is about a foot tall, and they watch the state entertainment channel on the radio, and then the next day they meet on the road some kazakh 'vitaminders' and take a future tech drug trip (the drug is a plastic pyramid, and the doctor has a long and vivid vision of being burned alive in a cauldron of hot oil, and then feels great afterwards), and then they run into a dead giant and the snowmobile runner breaks, and they never get to the village
The whole time it's freezing, and there's the sparse russian wilderness, and we're cold and can't see and the doctor is remembering his ex in Berlin and just
???
???
what did I read!
It was so cool...
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
I wasn't a huge fan of the trilogy (liked it well enough) but before that I read Best Served Cold which I liked way, way more. It's a stand-alone revenge/intrigue story taking place in the world's fantasy version of renaissance Italy.
Later I've also quite enjoyed Red Country, which is a kind of western set in a frontier region.
Both stories are much more focused and low-key than the trilogy. There's a chance that you might be like me and enjoy them despite being meh on the main trilogy.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I think I might have just suffered an aneurysm.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I guess, I'm not really into space heists at the moment. Quantium Magician is fine. But the character are well... selfish as hell. They leave a wake of destruction in their path, for ehh... limited amounts of good. It's a good romp.
And now there's about 20 of them and half of them are working for the cheka because they understand that in order to successfully find the rest of their brethren they have to be successful in society and that means working for the state apparatus. But also they can only eat berries and raw foods, and they only have to sleep 4 hours a night and they can speak heart-to-heart with the other Children of Light and again, what the fuck am I reading
It's super interesting! I love this author. He's really good at having characters derive illogical conclusions with utter certainty from sets of weird circumstances; very mystical.
I think the amount of good is kinda relative.
And as horrific as the Puppets and their civilization, dickbag geneticist might be able to change it for the... I wouldn’t say better but at least less awful. Especially for future Numen.
Anyways, over the last week I stumbled across the AMC show 'The Terror' based on Dan Simmons historical horror book of the same name, which I read a few years ago and quite liked. His other books in that sub-genre don't seem to have the same appeal to me right now but I would like to read some modern supernatural horror. Any suggestions?
Cherie Priest's Maplecroft and Chapelwood, which blend Lizzie Borden and Cthulu-esque supernatural investigation may be worth a look. Her Brimstone is good, too.
Teresa Frohock's Los Nefilim, set in the Spanish Civil War, may be worth looking into as well.
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I'm surprised it doesn't pass the Bechdel test.
I bought it yesterday but still have to finish my current book before I move over to this one. I’m looking forward to reading it though.
This is discounting the 10 books I read with my 2 year old (she came over with a big smile and wants to copy her 6 year old sister who got 5 books from the library yesterday afternoon and read 3 of them before she got home).
Oh and the bedtime stories.
I love that both my daughters are in to books although when sitting down to breakfast they just sit there with books to the side not saying anything (my wife also did this yesterday as well). Trying to get people ready in the morning is like herding cats.
I really liked it. A smoother read for me than her other books (which however, big fan).
And then finally the ending! Bam!
Edit: I finished it. I really liked it. I wish there was more. Maybe some sort of crazy fusion story between Ann Leckie and Yoon Ha Lee...
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
It's the best thing I've read in several years. I had to fight a very strong urge to just go back and read it again. I'm still not sure that I made the right call in not doing that.
It's about a priest in Oakham* taking confessions before the start of lent in the 15th century after a man drowns in the river. That doesn't sound like much of a hook but it works incredibly well, especially as the days are presented in reverse order, so you move backwards away from pancake day and towards the drowning. The resolution of what happened isn't the point, but every day gives every character another layer and makes them real in a way that is incredibly uncommon in any fiction.
So well done Samantha. I'll certainly read more of her stuff.
*confusingly not the one in Rutland but one in Somerset that also apparently exists
She makes a lot of good points. I think it's interesting how a lot of Generation X reacts to current events and their reaction to millennials. I think a lot of it is how they had this idea that the world was bullshit, and they were mopey, angry slackers, and they wanted to tear it all down and make something better, but they were just held down by the man. And they see millennials act to actually change things and it makes them nuts. Like the safe space thing. When the dominant culture pushes you down, you're supposed to go write a book or record an album about how mopey and angry you are at the man not respecting your sad cynical rage, not just gather with some like minded people and set up an area where you can go that you can get away from the dominant culture and do your own thing. How are people supposed to write long, angry, cynical diatribes on materialism and fakeness and record long, rambling rock albums about the shittiness of society when people just go about trying to actually fix things?
Small addendum to that. In their Gen X viewpoint privileged white kids are supposed to make art about crushing ennui. Anyone else does it is engaging is cheap "identity politics"
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Aye. The basic thrust you get of Ellis' complaints from the book is pretty standard. It's basically "these things suck, but these things are ok and the problem with them damn punk kids these days is they are complaining about the things that are ok". It's basically all like "Rich people are corrupt but all this talk about white privilege is just a bunch of bullshit" or whatever other examples you want for either point there.
Reading the full review, it's basically Old Man Yells at Millennial Clouds: The Rambling Book.
I do enjoy the reviewer basically saying that, no, I refuse to make this a big thing and give Ellis his moment in the sun being dunked on on twitter. This shit is more boring then it is offensive.
Kind of turn of the century era colonialism in a world where there used to be supremely magic gods who were killed.
It is so good.
Also, really appreciate how the languages and cultures of the world draw from Slavic and Indian (well, mostly just phonotactics for names tbh) instead of being the 10000th fantasy Britain.
Also also, it's interesting how it's sort of double colonialism - the pseudo slavic culture used to brutally oppress the rest of the world with their living gods as a sort of magic WMDs, until the pseudo-Indian culture killed all the gods with advanced technology and then proceeded to colonize the colonizers.
Some interesting stuff in there about how liberators turn into new imperialists, cycles of violence etc.
Neat! Know what I’m reading about after my sentient plant mutualism books.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
City of Stairs.