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Scorntyrant
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2004 5:55 am
Posts: 1516
PostPosted: Mon Feb 20, 2017 4:52 am 
 

failsafeman wrote:
Scorntyrant wrote:
3 thirds of the way through fifth head of Cerberus at the moment. Will withhold further comment till I finish.

Bruh if you're 3 thirds of the way through I think you just did


I math even worse than I adult apparently.
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~Guest 21181
The Great Fearmonger

Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 3:44 am
Posts: 3987
PostPosted: Mon Feb 20, 2017 11:13 am 
 

I'm halfway through Return to the Whorl, the last part of The Book of the Short Sun. This is a nice return to form after the disappointing slog that was the middle book in the trilogy, and I may like it a bit more than I did On Blue's Waters at the halfway point. As I'm reading it though I'm still wondering what could have been if Wolfe hadn't abandoned the main narrative a third of the way through In Green's Jungles the way he did.

Oh well. I'm enjoying the parts that take place in the Whorl immensely.

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brainbomb
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Feb 22, 2017 12:08 pm
Posts: 193
Location: Boston
PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 12:16 pm 
 

for whatever reason i completely fell off the wagon in regards to fiction. for almost a year now i've basically been reading non-fiction. it's weird. it came out of nowhere. at any rate i'm reading a people's history of the united states by howard zinn


Last edited by brainbomb on Wed Feb 22, 2017 2:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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andersbang
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:28 am
Posts: 1069
PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 12:36 pm 
 

I just finished Book of the New Sun for the second time. It's still great, though I don't think I revere it as much as some posters here do. I kinda feel it has a quality of being genuinely interesting almost all the time without being fantastic. I really like how most of the time it's fairly opaque because we only know what Severian knows. There are very points in the book I don't like, though they are there. Good read.

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Scorntyrant
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2004 5:55 am
Posts: 1516
PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 5:27 pm 
 

Finished Fifth head of Cerberus last night. Kinda puzzled and trying to see if my interpretation matches what others made of it. Looking around the net at reviews it seems on the money:

Spoiler: show
the anthropologist dies and the boy takes his place. One thing that interested me was the ghoul bear. Appears to be the same beast as the Alazabo in new sun. Which suggests that the boy may be not so much impersonating the man as incorporating his memories like Severian/Thecla


An order from book depository arrived the other day:

Roadside picnic
Canticle for liebowitz
Riddley Walker

Roadside picnic up first, then will rewatch Stalker to see how good an adaptation it is.
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brainbomb
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Feb 22, 2017 12:08 pm
Posts: 193
Location: Boston
PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 5:47 pm 
 

stalker is so good. still have not read roadside picnic.

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failsafeman
Digital Dictator

Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 8:45 am
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 7:02 pm 
 

Roadside Picnic is really good, and Stalker is really good, but they're very different. About the only similarity is the setting.
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brainbomb
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Feb 22, 2017 12:08 pm
Posts: 193
Location: Boston
PostPosted: Thu Feb 23, 2017 2:33 pm 
 

my roommate let me borrow a shitload of books on christianity, one of them being the origin of satan by elaine pagels. anyone here read it? looks pretty great.

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Thumbman
Big Cube

Joined: Mon Nov 16, 2009 6:47 pm
Posts: 4473
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 2:50 pm 
 

Robert Massie - Peter the Great
This is probably the best biography I've ever read. I think a big part of what turns people off of history is that it is often written about in a rather dry way. I hated history in highschool because it was presented as "memorize that this happened on this date and this act was passed on this date". Massie is a master of narrative and this reads almost like a novel at times. The story of Peter the Great is fascinating, reminds me of what Stalin did in the early thirties where he turned the backwards country around and modernized it at a breakneck pace. Peter's story is fascinating, and his accomplishments are massive, and his flaws are not glossed over. Easily one of my favourite books I've read about history.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Finally got around to reading this lol. For whatever reason I didn't have great expectations coming into this, and mostly picked it up because I felt it is a book I ought to be familiar with. I guess the movie did suck, but that's a stupid reason not to want to read a piece of classic literature. Overall, I liked it a lot although Hemmingway is definitely better. I really like how Fitzgerald maintains an engaging conversational tone while still being literature with a capital L. All the shit that went down in the end maybe happened a bit quicker than I'd like but a good book, for sure.

Autobiography of Miles Davis
This book was a motherfucker! Miles has been one of my favourite musicians for a little while, and it was really interesting to get a first hand perspective on my favourite eras of jazz. It's insane how many big players he's played with and how many of his sidemen went on to be succesful band leaders. Like shit, I had no idea that Charles Mingus played on one of his albums or that he played on some of Mingus's early work. The writing is very colloquial but you can tell it's very authentic Miles. I love how he'll talk about an important musician and be like "he was a bad motherfucker who didn't take no shit off no one". The whole addiction thing was brutal, the way he describes it fucking up and eventually killing Bird and him going through it as well. The part about him kicking heroin was fucking harrowing.
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Sabalos
Mallcore Kid

Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:42 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:51 pm 
 

Scorntyrant wrote:
An order from book depository arrived the other day:

Roadside picnic
Canticle for liebowitz
Riddley Walker

Roadside picnic up first, then will rewatch Stalker to see how good an adaptation it is.


It's nifty seeing those books next to each other - I'm fond of saying that A Canticle for Leibowitz made me want to write my own post-apocalyptic story, and Riddley Walker made me want to give up. It's immense. Have you read any other Russell Hoban?

Scorntyrant wrote:
Spoiler: show
the anthropologist dies and the boy takes his place. One thing that interested me was the ghoul bear. Appears to be the same beast as the Alazabo in new sun. Which suggests that the boy may be not so much impersonating the man as incorporating his memories like Severian/Thecla


Spoiler: show
That is a good catch! Although with it being Gene Wolfe I would bet it's intentional that basically you can't be sure one way or the other.

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andersbang
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:28 am
Posts: 1069
PostPosted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 8:07 am 
 

After finishing Book of the New Sun a little time ago I've run through Embassytown by Mieville again (I gifted it to my girlfriend after we watched Arrival and got to talking about aliens and language and I remembered reading it some time ago, so I gave it to her and then read it again myself), and Ready Player One which my friend lent me, though I didn't like it much. It's apparently getting made into a movie, but it was horrendously written.

Now I'm a couple hundred pages into one of my favorites, The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. Such a great work, a merciless, rambling, brutal mind fuck of great scope in World War II. We follow the young, aloof SS-officer Dr. Aue, a classic intellectual who speaks Greek and Latin, a homosexual member of the Sonderkommandos (edit: Einsatzgruppen) on the Eastern Front, a bureaucrat and a butcher. Add theoretical discussions of Indo-Iranian language, incest, German military bureaucracy, mass executions, the Battle of Stalingrad, feverish dream sequences, to your liking. Almost 1000 pages of diabolical insanity. Goddamn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindl ... tell_novel)

Edit: It's also interesting for the history buffs. Littell spent 18 months researching, read 200 historical books on the war/Eastern Front and visited many of the places in the book.


Last edited by andersbang on Tue Mar 07, 2017 7:18 am, edited 2 times in total.
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caspian
Old Man Yells at Car Park

Joined: Tue Dec 07, 2004 11:29 pm
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Location: Australia
PostPosted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 8:13 am 
 

currently struggling my way through Iain Banks' Hydrogen Sonata. Dunno, seems like a space opera that would be right up my alley but I'm finding it kinda boring. Also wondering if I skipped 100 pages by accident or something because it is making increasingly less sense as it goes on. Oh well.
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Scorntyrant
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2004 5:55 am
Posts: 1516
PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 2:51 am 
 

"The kindly ones" is indeed great, but Aue is in the Einsatzgruppen (or more accurately is temporaraly seconded to them from the RSHA) not Sonderkommando, who were the poor bastards tasked with disposing of their fellow prisoners bodies.

Pedantry aside, its also a retelling of the myth of Orestes and the furies (the titular kindly ones) which is a nice touch.
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andersbang
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:28 am
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 7:17 am 
 

Good catch.

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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

Joined: Sat Feb 21, 2009 5:55 am
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Location: Tyrn Gorthad
PostPosted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 1:19 am 
 

I finished Grimscribe last week and was generally pretty damn pleased with it. A few of the stories do basically go nowhere, which is kind of a shame. Just, "weird things happen, and then the story is over" kind of stuff without any big horror-bombs or twists or whatever that I always liked about Lovecraft's best work. Then again, Lovecraft himself did have a few kind of go-nowhere, more forgettable stories himself, so I can't exactly fault Ligotti for that so much. I also just really liked how he takes that creaky old-sounding prose and uses it for stories that take place in more modern times. It'd be cool to read even newer stuff by him where characters have access to mobile phones or the internet or whatever - I wouldn't expect him to really incorporate these things as important plot elements, the opposite really, but it'd be neat to see what he could do with even more contemporary settings.

This week I've started up The Stars My Destination and it's awesome so far. Kinda crazy that such a gritty cyberpunk sort of story was written so damn long ago, though it is admittedly pretty weird to describe as cyberpunk a book that has a notable absence of computers. That is kind of the one glaring flaw so far - I mean they make clear that jaunting would result in major changes in warfare, transportation, trade, etc., but it still takes a while for even the best jaunters to go across a continent, so having even phone technology be almost totally obsolete doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. Anyway it's cool as fuck so far, I especially loved the total savages living in that cobbled-together debris-asteroid who were backwards as shit inbred remnants of scientists who just spouted off scientific tropes with no actual understanding or context. Really neat ideas, and I kinda love the protagonist being such a cunning caveman anti-hero.
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failsafeman
Digital Dictator

Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 8:45 am
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Location: In the Arena
PostPosted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 6:36 am 
 

I've read almost every Ligotti story and I don't think he ever mentions the internet or cell phones, except maybe briefly in passing in something like My Work Is Not Yet Done, which has an office setting. Even then, it features stacks of paper and such, rather than computer files. I'm not sure I've ever seen him say it specifically in an interview or whatever, but I'm pretty sure he keeps his stories intentionally anachronistic, with tape recorders and such rather than the latest tech.

Also, I'm curious to know how what you think of The Stars My Destination once you finish it. I thought it started strong and then mostly got progressively worse, with a few exceptions here and there. I wrote my thoughts on it back on page 130, check out my post once you finish.
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

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PostPosted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 1:26 pm 
 

I figure it was probably your post (and any subsequent discussion?) that probably got me to put it on my list, since I was in need of some good sci-fi stuff to read between Ligotti and The Vorrh. I can't remember exactly what you said about it, but it must've been high enough praise to get me interested!
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failsafeman
Digital Dictator

Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 8:45 am
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Location: In the Arena
PostPosted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 7:09 pm 
 

Yeah you're probably right, I'm a pretty big influence on you.
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Razakel
Nekroprince

Joined: Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:36 pm
Posts: 6232
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Fri Mar 10, 2017 6:29 pm 
 

iamntbatman wrote:
I figure it was probably your post (and any subsequent discussion?) that probably got me to put it on my list, since I was in need of some good sci-fi stuff to read between Ligotti and The Vorrh. I can't remember exactly what you said about it, but it must've been high enough praise to get me interested!


Perfect timing on Vorrh! I just reread it last month (just as amazing as I remembered it, I'm in awe of that book) and its sequel, which just came out, arrived in my mail yesterday! 40 pages in and game-changing shit is already going down. Let me know when you begin!

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Nahsil
Clerical Sturmgeschütz

Joined: Sun Jan 08, 2006 2:06 pm
Posts: 4578
Location: United States
PostPosted: Fri Mar 10, 2017 7:20 pm 
 

I'm almost done with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I want some light but well-written and engaging stuff. Thinking about diving into more Discworld, been a while. Any other recs?

I can't do heavy fiction right now between taking a crazy Foucault class and doing therapy, lol.
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Scorntyrant
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Nov 15, 2004 5:55 am
Posts: 1516
PostPosted: Fri Mar 10, 2017 8:39 pm 
 

Not sure if I mentioned this, but I've been involved in publishing/bookselling/librarianship on and off for the last 20-something years. At the moment I'm working as a content consultant/analyst for one of the companies that aggregate E-books and journals for academic libraries. One of the perks is that I have access to the whole collection, and for giggles I regularly trawl through looking to see what's there that specifically interests me. The other day I found Al Jourgensen of Ministry fame's autobiography and read it at my desk over a couple of days. How that guy is still alive I have no idea.

The downside of having done this for so long comes when I have to move house as I'm doing at the moment. Books are fucking heavy when you have to move them up flights of stairs, and I have accumulated so many it's not funny. Between that and the 600-odd vinyl records my back hates me right now.
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AblackanatioN
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Mar 09, 2007 9:36 am
Posts: 276
Location: United States
PostPosted: Sat Mar 18, 2017 7:35 pm 
 

Any fans of Dennis Lehane? I've only read Mystic River and picked up a used copy of Live By Night today not realizing that it's the 2nd book in the series. So of course I had to order the first book once I got home so I can read in order.

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Empyreal
The Final Frontier

Joined: Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:58 pm
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Location: Where the dead rule the night
PostPosted: Sat Mar 18, 2017 7:45 pm 
 

He's my favorite author. The third book in that trilogy, "World Gone By," is stone fucking brilliant. I love the way he writes characters and the world-weary, insightful prose that often packs in various little nuggets of wisdom and whatnot. Brilliant for its accessibility as well as depth. Mystic River is actually my favorite novel.
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AblackanatioN
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Joined: Fri Mar 09, 2007 9:36 am
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 18, 2017 10:44 pm 
 

Empyreal wrote:
He's my favorite author. The third book in that trilogy, "World Gone By," is stone fucking brilliant. I love the way he writes characters and the world-weary, insightful prose that often packs in various little nuggets of wisdom and whatnot. Brilliant for its accessibility as well as depth. Mystic River is actually my favorite novel.


I'm looking forward to reading the trilogy. The back of Live By Night sounded like it would be right up my alley so I had to grab it for only $1.99. Mystic River was some heavy shit, I had seen the film previously and they are both great in there own way. Always love adding authors to my reading list!

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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

Joined: Sat Feb 21, 2009 5:55 am
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Location: Tyrn Gorthad
PostPosted: Sat Mar 18, 2017 11:46 pm 
 

Finished "The Stars My Destination." Overall super happy with it. It's not super deep or anything, but is action-packed, gritty, and just plain badass. I'd say for sure the coolest thing I've read out of that Golden Era of Sci-Fi or whatever.

I also started "The Vorrh"....I'll wait until I'm a little further in to comment on it as it's pretty disorienting so far. That said, if you have a Goodreads account and you start to type "The Vorrh" into the search bar and only get as far as "The Vorr", you get a bunch of autocomplete results by someone named Jay Vorr such as "My Clit On Hers" and "HER BUSH ON MINE" and "Aunt Molly Is Going Back Home (My Juiciest Taboo Series)".
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Empyreal
The Final Frontier

Joined: Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:58 pm
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Location: Where the dead rule the night
PostPosted: Sun Mar 19, 2017 2:15 am 
 

^ Basically my thoughts on The Stars My Destination... I just remember it being a super fun, pulpy read. I'd like to go back to it sometime.

I've heard of The Vorrh, sounds cool to me. Should track that down.

AblackanatioN wrote:
Empyreal wrote:
He's my favorite author. The third book in that trilogy, "World Gone By," is stone fucking brilliant. I love the way he writes characters and the world-weary, insightful prose that often packs in various little nuggets of wisdom and whatnot. Brilliant for its accessibility as well as depth. Mystic River is actually my favorite novel.


I'm looking forward to reading the trilogy. The back of Live By Night sounded like it would be right up my alley so I had to grab it for only $1.99. Mystic River was some heavy shit, I had seen the film previously and they are both great in there own way. Always love adding authors to my reading list!


Live By Night is very solid, but actually kinda pales in comparison to both The Given Day and World Gone By. But they're all worth reading together for sure.

Coronado, his short story collection, is amazing too, check that one.

I'm reading George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo - a bizarre read about Abraham Lincoln's dead son in purgatory surrounded by fucking weird ghosts. Quite poignant and literary - sad at times but then also whimsically strange and refreshingly human. Deeply layered intrigue.
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Nahsil
Clerical Sturmgeschütz

Joined: Sun Jan 08, 2006 2:06 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 19, 2017 2:09 pm 
 

I'm almost done with Scalzi's Old Man's War. Such a fun, interesting, quick read. Looking forward to the other books in the series.
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Azmodes
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Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2007 10:44 am
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Location: Ob der Enns, Austria
PostPosted: Sun Mar 19, 2017 2:22 pm 
 

I like Scalzi. Those books are just fun and interesting palate cleansers.

iamntbatman wrote:
I also started "The Vorrh"....I'll wait until I'm a little further in to comment on it as it's pretty disorienting so far.

It doesn't really improve in that regard, IMO.

I recently finished Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale. It's a bit long-winded sometimes, but on the whole a really enlightening and informative read. Started Greg Egan's The Clockwork Rocket with its intriguing fundamental constant-mirroring premise and I can already tell that there's gonna be a lot of stuff sailing right over my head! Wouldn't be Egan without that.
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Erdrickgr
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Nov 23, 2007 6:44 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 19, 2017 6:00 pm 
 

I've been reading The Time of Contempt by Andrzej Sapkowski. I had previously read the first novel, Blood of Elves, and the collection of short stories The Last Wish. For whatever reason I can't get hooked on this, and have only read as much as I have because I love the world and characters in The Witcher video games.

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PhantomGreen
Metalhead

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 19, 2017 10:16 pm 
 

Reading In the garden of the beasts by Erik Larson.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through but I am enjoying it so far, it's easy read and flows smoothly. The surreal calm and general denial of things to come during the early years of Hitler's rule in Berlin is very unnerving.
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iamntbatman
Chaos Breed

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 19, 2017 11:37 pm 
 

Azmodes wrote:
iamntbatman wrote:
I also started "The Vorrh"....I'll wait until I'm a little further in to comment on it as it's pretty disorienting so far.

It doesn't really improve in that regard, IMO.


Well hopefully not. I like that about it. I just wanna get a bit further in to get introduced to more of the characters I know are in it, and generally just see some more stuff happen. Fingers crossed that I won't have many essays to correct at work this week so I can make some good progress in it.
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TheWaltzer
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 7:08 am 
 

Started China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station". Had little time to read lately, but after loving "The City And The City", I just decided to go for this one. So much confusion right from the start... I imagine that in 100 pages, my mind will be completely bent and, hopefully, I'll be hooked.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 2:50 pm 
 

There are a lot of good things in Perdido Street Station, but plot and structure aren't among them. It's been said that Mieville would do better to write flashcards than novels, and while that's hyperbole, it's not too far off.
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andersbang
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 9:28 am
Posts: 1069
PostPosted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 5:01 pm 
 

Funny, I just lent my buddy my copy of Perdido Street Station today, and yes, it's very confusing at first. Definitely not perfect, but I still really really like it and the way he does this very gritty take on steampunk/fantasy. I think the plot is pretty good, very simple of course, but he uses it to great effect with world building, and there's so much to take in that a really deep plot would just confuse even more I think. Pacing and structure are the book's biggest flaws, but yeah, still a big fan.

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Razakel
Nekroprince

Joined: Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:36 pm
Posts: 6232
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 5:12 pm 
 

Azmodes wrote:
I like Scalzi. Those books are just fun and interesting palate cleansers.

iamntbatman wrote:
I also started "The Vorrh"....I'll wait until I'm a little further in to comment on it as it's pretty disorienting so far.

It doesn't really improve in that regard, IMO.


You really found that? I remember it took me a good few chapters to really wrap my head around each of the simultaneous stories, but once I'd been introduced to each main character I had no trouble at all following along. It's a bit to keep track of, but I wouldn't call it "disorienting," especially not after the first 100 pages.

I'm over halfway through the second book now, Erstwhile, and it's damned good. Some game-changing shit going down I never expected.

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Azmodes
Ultranaut

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 5:19 pm 
 

Razakel wrote:
You really found that?

Yeah. To be fair, I did kind of get my bearings after the first third or so, but it never really seemed to clear up 100% and go somewhere.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 5:33 pm 
 

Razakel wrote:
Some game-changing shit going down I never expected.

Phrases like this are really un-selling me this book :lol: Is it a novel about bros going to keggers and high-fiving extradimensional beings?
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Razakel
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Joined: Wed Dec 06, 2006 8:36 pm
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 20, 2017 9:43 pm 
 

No, but I can't really say what it's about without spoiling the first book (even reading a synopsis of the second book spoils the first). It's more exciting than the first though, at least for the most part. The first has lots of exciting bits as it builds momentum, but some of its characters and stories move quite slowly. In this regard I'd again compare it to Gormenghast, which is a very clear influence.

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Thumbman
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Joined: Mon Nov 16, 2009 6:47 pm
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 21, 2017 10:29 am 
 

Just finished Bram Stoker's Dracula. Some pretty excellent stuff, and the first quarter or so when he's prisoner in Dracula's castle was so fucking suspenseful and amazing. The rest was great, too. I thought presenting the book as different character's diary entries and even newspaper clippings was really interesting.
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InnesI
The Goat Fucker

Joined: Sat Jun 01, 2013 3:19 pm
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 21, 2017 1:36 pm 
 

dystopia4 wrote:
Just finished Bram Stoker's Dracula. Some pretty excellent stuff, and the first quarter or so when he's prisoner in Dracula's castle was so fucking suspenseful and amazing. The rest was great, too. I thought presenting the book as different character's diary entries and even newspaper clippings was really interesting.


I also thought the first part was the best. Stoker somewhat lured me back into it at the end also. I thought the England part was by far the weakest. I also have a problem with the stereotypical vampire stuff like the garlic and such. Obviously it wasn't stereotypical at the time of this being written but having heard the story so many times in different media I can't help but groan a little when things like that are brought up. I'd say its a 3 out 5 kind of book. :-)
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