Social Hooper McFinney's RPF Bar & Grille 7.5 - "Loving the lens flare since 1977!” -!

Knowing me, it was probably going to eventually spiral out into the metafiction mess my games always spiral out into - some faster than others.

It's all in the mind.

 

I tried reading one of the Shannara books based on a friends suggestion, it didn't agree with me however. I have been considering The Wheel of Time series lately, heard it was good. Anyone have any first hand feedback to share?

 

Didn't Robert Jordan pull a Frank Herbert? I swore never again after reading the... interesting interpretation of the Dune series finale as presented by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

 

No idea, never read anything by him. Only going based on word of mouth.

I am in dire need of some new fantasy to read.

 

I'm not big into fantasy I haven't really read much aside from a brief forray into Game of Thrones book one.

On a slight tangent, I picked up David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest today and I'm looking forward to dive into that bad boy.

 

The Song of Ice and Fire gets really good very fast, I loved all of them so far (haven't read A Dance with Dragons yet).

I had no idea what Infinite Jest was so I went out and found a plot blurb on it, looks....different. Let me know if it is worth picking up.

 

Babby's first Joyce.*

Spoiler: *

Disclaimer: I haven't actually read it, a certain literature board just likes to lob that insult around, and who am I to contest such a proud and storied tradition?

 

I have no idea what that means.

 

Yeah I'm lost on that

 

"Babby's first" is an expression generally meaning something is for newcomers. A tricycle would be babby's first bicycle, for example.

Joyce refers to the fact that this book and this book both exist.

 

Robert Jordan did pull a Frank Herbert, but I've not been hearing a lot of outrage about Brandon Sanderson, who was brought in to finish off the series. He wrote the Mistwar series and is responsible for a couple of really cool articles on creating magic systems for fiction - google up Sanderson's First Law or Sanderson's Second Law on that.

I started reading Wheel of Time some years ago. Didn't finish it, mainly because in my personal view that while the first couple of books are excellent stuff, the series goes into what it's most kind to call "Unexpected Plot Deviations" and less kind to call "Padding the story out". Around book five through seven, so I've heard, nothing happens as such. As I said, this was when I was a bit younger and had a lot less patience for a plot moving at less speed than lightning pace, so it might warrant another look.

Good recommendations for fantasy ... I hear good things about Joe Abercrombie if you're into gritty, "squad based" sort of fantasy (Red Country and the like, a sort of Sharpe's Brigade in fantasyland as I understand it) though I've not read him. Actually I've not read a lot of recent fantasy. About the last recent book in fantasy I read (and gave up on due to a lack of time and other interests) was The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks. There seem to be a lot of Assassin's Creed clones popular at the moment, and Way of Shadows is about a master thief and his apprentice, but the novel is a nice, choppy sort of read at least to start with. I've got a horrible feeling we'll be seeing a lot of grim, gritty fantasy in the wake of George Martin.

One book again I've not read but which seems to be popular is The Name of the Wind. It's polarising, though: going by goodreads.com it seems to be the sort of book you either adore or hate with a passion. Either it's a story about the greatest mage in existence who you identify with and have a lot of fun watching his life story in action - or it's a wish-fulfillment fantasy for every kid who wasn't popular in high school/college, with a thoroughly unlikeable and arrogant main character. That seems to be the range of reactions.

Me, I've been back in the twentieth century and really in the "orange spine" section of the bookstore for most of my fiction at the moment. I've been consciously looking for stuff that seems acknowledged as the best in its field, and I'm not averse to good science fiction, so I picked up a copy of Hyperion the other day. I'm told it's one of the three best works of science fiction, second only to Dune and comes with high praise - a sort of Cantebury Tales IN SPACE, which is intriguing. I hear Fall of Hyperion is as good if not better. Still have to get round to reading it, of course. Also found a sad little copy of Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea which I've always meant to sit down and look at. And then there's Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, which also comes pretty highly recommended even if I hear I'm going to wind up reading yet another beating-of-breast-by-American-over-the-Vietnam-War, only this time in space.

Small side rant: having read a little Cormac McCarthy and getting into John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (my current read) I'm incredibly frustrated with Stephen King. McCarthy does Stephen King better than Stephen King (compare The Stand with The Road and tell me which is the better post-apocalyptic horror novel) and King has been ripping elements of Steinbeck, consciously or otherwise, for whole books now. On the other hand I have an intuition that most American fiction homages Steinbeck in one way or another, not that I can really understand why -- yes, Steinbeck's good, but there's plenty of other writers who have more punch.

EDIT: Oh! If, like me, you like "historical mysteries" in the style of Indiana Jones, then I thoroughly recommend a book called A Talent for War by Jack McGee. The twist is that it's Indiana Jones IN SPACE, which sounds a bit ridiculous, but McGee does a half-decent George Martin in that he doesn't just create an ancient, lost history - he creates a history that impacts on the modern world. Seriously, if you can find it, read it, because it's a great little one-off book. Don't bother with anything else by the author, but this short book is a cracker.

 

I've read a theory... somewhere... to the effect that every post-Steinbeck novel in America has been either an attempt to emulate one (or more) of his elements or a conscious move away from him. I dunno if that really pans out in practice, but I'm pretty sure he's nevertheless become synonymous with the great American novel for good or ill.

Plus he's really, really standard reading in our English courses here. I'd say his odds of cropping up in a curriculum are something like fourth behind Shakespeare, Twain, and Hemingway, in that order, and the latter, sadly, really only because of The Old Man and the Sea being easy to fit into short time periods.

 

Yeah. And Steinbeck feels a lot like Huckleberry Finn IN SPACE in California. I can't remember who said "Never start a novel with weather", to which the answer seems to be "...unless you're John Steinbeck."

 

I don't know what to recommend you guys in terms of books, but I know what not to recommend.

It's a book with the dethroned line of a kingdom, lost dragons who might return, mighty empires, violence, oppression, and brother-sister twincest...



...and it isn't A Song of Ice and Fire.

It's Sea Dragon Heir by Storm Constantine, one of the few books I just couldn't finish. It takes all those elements, and injects into them all the thrilling drama of watching paint dry. If I had used that book to paper a birdcage, I would have been far better served by it than I was by reading it.

 

A shame about the book, because that is seriously the best name ever.

Also, apparently Wikipedia has a special page just for twincest. You know, in case you couldn't put two and two together.

 

That's what I thought, Ramza.
"Oh, hey, fantasy with dragons, and what a cool author name, I'll try this! *readread* WTF? ...Um, that's disturbing. When is the action going to happen now? Zzzzzzz..."

 

An interesting fantasy series would be Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series. Its only six books long, but it presents a very interesting take on magic, as well as a very different sort of enemy. Don't get me wrong, there is the usual amount of skulduggary that takes place, what with shifting alliances, traitors, etc. But the major antagonist is very different than what I have seen before. Oh, and did I mention that almost all the humans in the books are the descendants of the lost Roman legion?

 

That twigged me onto three more books, all by the same author - Robert Westall. Urn Burial, Futuretrack 5, and The Wind Eye.

All three are short pieces, mainly because they're in that part of the ghetto we call "Young Adult" books. Robert Westall wrote from an English perspective. Futuretrack 5 in particular was published back in 1980 or so and has dated a bit.
And yet.
And yet.
Put it this way, some YA books retain their lustre even when you're 20 years on and reading them again. These would be three of them, IMHO. The Wind Eye in particular resonates powerfully compared with when I read it as a teenager, and there's a lot of adult themes and adult sensibilities running through the material. I'm conscious of the "this book was awesome when I was 15, less so now" effect, and Westall does not fall victim to that. I think it's mainly because Westall, like most smart YA authors, does not talk down to his audience. He's also got a wonderful, sarky English wit to him, and it comes across in these books. They're so English, and not at all in the "museum English" way that, say, J.K. Rowling writes. No Rumpole of the Bailey or P.G. Wodehouse here: this is poverty-stricken, low to low-middle class England coming in contact with the supernatural. All of them are set in grey, earthy locations: Urn Burial on lonely Welsh hills; Futuretrack 5 in the nightmare of a post-Thatcherian future that frankly has in some ways come to pass; The Wind Eye on a windswept York coast. All three I suppose you could technically count as science fiction, though Wind Eye has much more early Christian mysticism contained in it. I thoroughly recommend all of them.

 

Frank Herbert's Dune:



KJA and Brian Herbert's Dune: entirely forgettable.

 

Yeah, that's the most egregious sin of the whole affair - it's not even a grotesque abomination profaning against all aspects of Dune I hold sacrosanct, it's just... mediocre. Really, really mediocre.

Whatever, it's all in the past now. Currently I am reading Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones and it's an utterly fascinating account of the men who shaped the American comics industry as we know it today - the creators and, more interestingly, the publishers, who don't get talked about too often. It's an unflatteringly honest look at the whole affair - there are no heroes in real life, after all, only men.

... And yet somehow Bob Kane still comes across as an evil ass. Bob Kane: so despicable he's even despicable in comparison to Harry Donenfeld.

 

*lurks*

 

I have no defense for our current tangent save the obvious one:

 

Bah! I too love reading! Getting some good ideas by watching you guys.

 

Amazing posts. I am going to have to reread and take some notes, there is so much mentioned over the past day that I have never heard of.

That got me to start thinking about what I read, and I came to the realization that I really have a narrow spectrum of authors that I gravitate towards and very rarely do I find the courage to venture out to someone new. It isn't like a book is that expensive, but I loath the thought of purchasing a book only to have it sit on the shelf because I couldn't get myself to finish it.

Maybe I need to take some more risks, odds are I am missing out on a lot of good literature.

 

That's why used book stores are really awesome - if you don't like the book and you're within the return window, you can return it. If not, sell it back.