[Nicodimas]

<i was teasing>

Everyone should have that book others loathe, that they thoroughly enjoy for whateverfingreason.

I have a thing for going back to Low Fantasy..or I mean Heroic fantasy..for fun!! Like that fantasy you read to get to the good stuff and realized the differance. probably terrible books to most...but whatevs..well from time to time. haha

This post has been edited by Nicodimas: 13 November 2014 - 10:33 PM

[Andorion]

Puck, on 13 November 2014 - 10:03 PM, said:

Salt-Man Z, on 13 November 2014 - 09:07 PM, said:

Nicodimas, on 13 November 2014 - 08:54 PM, said:

Do you really want to spend your time on book others thought that low..

Depends; if the twihards hate it, maybe it deserves a look...

^
This.

If I do bother to look beyond this forum for recommendations, I prefer to look at a couple of reviews (both with good and bad ratings) and see if what they say appeals to me. Some of the stuff I've read and enjoyed this year was barely chewing at the 3.5 mark on Goodreads, but the things some of the reviewers seemed to dislike about it made me want to check the books out, and lo and behold, these were exactly the things I actually liked.

Say, as someone who's interested in non-heteronormative/non-cis characters I was overjoyed to find the - according to some reviews - 'gratuitous and unnatural sexuality' in Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder Trilogy, but the trilogy averanges at about 3.7 on Goodreads, even though if one would look past one's heteronormative view one would find that none of the things in there have been invented by Bear, nor are lesbians and transgendered people 'unnatural', and I can think of a bunch of books with more explicit sex scenes in one single volume than one in a whole trilogy.. *sigh* Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Son of a Witch (of the Wicked Years series) were both immensely enjoyable for me, but a lot of people seem to have read it because they liked the broadway show based on Wicked and gave it a bad rating because they found it to be too different from the show.

So yeah, people base the ratings they give on the weirdest things, and not neccessarily on the work's merits/flaws as a story. I'm not a fan of the rating system, and while I don't read all the reviews, a handful tends to give me an idea of whether I want to read something or not. What the ratings ARE good for is fast identification of positive and negative opinions so I can read both and build a hopefully educated opinion

Quote

Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Son of a Witch (of the Wicked Years series) were both immensely enjoyable for me, but a lot of people seem to have read it because they liked the broadway show based on Wicked and gave it a bad rating because they found it to be too different from the show.

I remember reading this and thinking 'this is so much better than the original Oz'

[Andorion]

Book tastes are really subjective sometimes. I for one absolutely love to read trashy, pulpy monster fiction which are usually Jurassic Park or Jaws ripoffs, and the reviews for these books are usually horrible.

[Esa1996]

What annoys me in Goodreads is that there are multiple entries for most books. Whatever book you search for it'll give you at least five entries of the same book with different ratings.

Where do I get my book recommendations? So far I haven't gotten any from here, but I got the Wheel of Time (I decided to do something else than rereading ASOIAF until Martin gets the next book out, and I'm happy I did so. Made the surprising discovery that there are other books that are just as good if not better than ASOIAF) and Malazan series from the ASOIAF forums. Now nearing the end of the Malazan series, I'll be reading The Stormlight Archive next (That one I decided to read after reading the last three WOT books by Brandon Sanderson, and deciding to read it instead of Mistborn).

The Second Apocalypse, The Kingkiller Chronicle, Black Company and The First Law came from various "Best Fantasy Series Ever" lists found all over the internet.

Thus far I have only read ASOIAF, WOT and most of Malazan (Reading FOD at the moment, and still have three K&B stories left) from the books I mentioned.

This post has been edited by Esa1996: 14 November 2014 - 08:28 PM

[HiddenOne]

worry, on 13 November 2014 - 05:07 AM, said:

Book 6 is the one where the chicken has sex with all the babes and dispatches Karlak Marxanon with the Axe of Liberty.

You fiend! Where's the spoiler alert????? I was just about to settle down by the fire with this book and a chilled bottle of cyanide - you've ruined my whole weekend