[Abyss]

 amphibian, on 20 June 2013 - 04:44 AM, said:

...
Jorg is like a ta'averen of violence. Except he's way, way better than Rand/Mat/Perrin ever were as characters. He's like mini-Caine. Tiny, but fierce.

And the award for most popular genre series refs worked into a single sentence goes to....

 amphibian, on 20 June 2013 - 04:45 AM, said:

 Stalker, on 20 June 2013 - 03:11 AM, said:

Just finished a reread of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, since I have finally have the next two books set to go.

Terrific. Be prepared for setting/tonal shifts. Fun, fun books and Woken Furies might be one of my favorite emotional reads of all time.

It IS a brilliant book. Morgan has some great fun with various sf and political elements and tells a great story in the process.

 QuickTidal, on 20 June 2013 - 10:48 AM, said:

This is the last Kovac book that I've not read...it sits in my ToRead Pile....maybe it's time to crack that badboy.

It's time. It's SO time.

[Serenity]

Making a start on Cook's The Silver Spike. Decided on that ahead of The Black Dahlia due to the size of the Books of the South omnibus and me having a long weekend, so not having to carry it to work and back

[Kruppe's snacky cakes]

 Abyss, on 19 June 2013 - 06:30 PM, said:

 Mentalist, on 19 June 2013 - 06:19 PM, said:

 Kruppe, on 18 June 2013 - 03:17 PM, said:

... Someday, steampunk...someday I will enjoy you. But thus far, it seems like you are always narrated by the teacher from Ferris Bueller. My kingdom for some entertaining prose!

Have you read "Whitechapel Gods" yet?

What he said. Seriously. SM Peters did awesome things with that book and if you're searching for superior steampunk, it's worth your dollars.


I'll also give a semi-nod to Lavie Tidhar's THE BOOKMAN. At 1/2way I haven't quite made up my mind whether it's brilliant or just interesting, but i'm liking it. Turn of the century London with Lizard aristocracy, automatons, dirigibles and Mars probes, plus terrorist bombs, mysterious orphans and a hard partyingTom Thumb. And the odd whale symphony. The pace is slower than perhaps i might like, but the setting holds my attention and when Tidhar gets creative, it's pretty neat. Like Grant Morrison on less drugs.

Yes, yes, Whitechapel Gods is on my wishlist. Every time I mention steampunk, someone recommends it. Probably you same people. Stop badgering me! Anyway, it has middling reviews on Amazon, which worries me, since I tend to be choosier than the average reader. I'll read it at some point...

I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, The Bookman and the omnibus is now on my wishlist. Although, when I first mentioned it here, my description of it as steampunk was pooh-poohed. Get your stories straight! Anyway, if I can count this as steampunk, then I have enjoyed exactly two steampunk books in my life: The Bookman, and The Falling Machine.

[Kruppe's snacky cakes]

 Orlion, on 19 June 2013 - 08:17 PM, said:

 Kruppe, on 18 June 2013 - 03:17 PM, said:

125. The Magicians by Lev Grossman = Harry Potter + Narnia + adult situations. This one has mixed reviews, but I really enjoyed it.

I read this for a book club a couple years ago. It seems the farther away from it I am, the less I am critical of it. Grossman is very bare-bones, but that also means he does not outstay his welcome in any of the environments we find our characters in. It seems like I have most problems with the execution, but the various critiques of YA fantasy are excellent.

Spoiler

And I hated when the 'Beast' returned as the lost Martin brother or whatever. I would have preferred that it stayed an unknown, shadowy danger of messing with magic... unknowable, unpredictable...

I like that magic in this world is very tough to master and has very dangerous consequences. Often times in books like Harry Potter, a character may be blown to pieces by magic and be just fine after carted off to the nurse's office. Here, you screw up, you do not get another chance, and nothing can save you.

Yes, that's kind of what I liked about it.

Spoiler

And I thought the Martin thing was clever. Made it sort of a flipside Narnia tale.

[Mentalist]

 Kruppe, on 20 June 2013 - 09:01 PM, said:

 Abyss, on 19 June 2013 - 06:30 PM, said:

 Mentalist, on 19 June 2013 - 06:19 PM, said:

 Kruppe, on 18 June 2013 - 03:17 PM, said:

... Someday, steampunk...someday I will enjoy you. But thus far, it seems like you are always narrated by the teacher from Ferris Bueller. My kingdom for some entertaining prose!

Have you read "Whitechapel Gods" yet?

What he said. Seriously. SM Peters did awesome things with that book and if you're searching for superior steampunk, it's worth your dollars.


I'll also give a semi-nod to Lavie Tidhar's THE BOOKMAN. At 1/2way I haven't quite made up my mind whether it's brilliant or just interesting, but i'm liking it. Turn of the century London with Lizard aristocracy, automatons, dirigibles and Mars probes, plus terrorist bombs, mysterious orphans and a hard partyingTom Thumb. And the odd whale symphony. The pace is slower than perhaps i might like, but the setting holds my attention and when Tidhar gets creative, it's pretty neat. Like Grant Morrison on less drugs.

Yes, yes, Whitechapel Gods is on my wishlist. Every time I mention steampunk, someone recommends it. Probably you same people. Stop badgering me! Anyway, it has middling reviews on Amazon, which worries me, since I tend to be choosier than the average reader. I'll read it at some point...

I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, The Bookman and the omnibus is now on my wishlist. Although, when I first mentioned it here, my description of it as steampunk was pooh-poohed. Get your stories straight! Anyway, if I can count this as steampunk, then I have enjoyed exactly two steampunk books in my life: The Bookman, and The Falling Machine.

I've read the Bookman Omnibus. I consider it to be to much of a mashup to call it "steampunk". There are elements of that, true, but there's elements of a lot of stuff. I consider it to be a great example of "genre-punk" (it's on tvtropes. I won't link it, because i'm not evil, but if you're feeling adventurous, look it up)--it's a mashup of so many awesome things (and "Camera Obscura" just adds even more stuff to an already great formula) that I think i'll be doing it a huge disservice characterising it as pure steampunk. Because it is so much more....

[Mentalist]

Finished Anne Lyle's "Alchemist of Souls". Book 1 of the "Night's Masque". More Angry robot-published books. This one's an alternative history in Elizabethan England, where New World is populated partly by a non-human race that has magic, and became England's allies. The book is set in Lindon and revolves around politics and intrigue surrounding the arrival of the skraylings (that' the name of the non-humans) ambassador to London. There's obviously more to that, but that's the jist of it.
Book also revolves a lot around theatre, and a bunch of other themes are canvassed (one of the main characters is a girl in the theatre company who has spent the last 5 years pretending to be a boy). These themes are not by any means the focus of the book and at no point do they become heavy-handed. The book really picks p towards the middle, even if it does suffer from some pacing problems early on. Overall, not a bad read, I'll probably give the sequel a try sooner or later.

Not sure what to read next (again) currently thinking of giving Mieville's "Railsea" a try.

[JPK]

Mentalist, I read Railsea very recently and absolutely loved it. It's very very hard to go wrong with that one.

Woke up to a couple of presents from my S.O. for my birthday today... Abbadon's Gate and Tyrant's Law. Very very good timing on her part, as I've just read 350 pages worth of The King's Blood over the last two days. Going to have to tweak my reading list to fit these in asap.

[QuickTidal]

James Rollins latest Sigma book EYE OF GOD...I've read the prologue...already pretty damned good.

[Coco with marshmallows]

Just polished off all F*****g four F*****g Caine books. On F*****g Kindle.

You F***s.

Now onto Leviathan Wakes.

[Ukjent]

Done with Inferno by Dan Brown, better then Digital Fortress but still not that impressed.

[D'iversify]

Finished Being & Time after about a year of on-and-off reading. No epically mind-melting conclusion, but then Heidegger apparently intended to write two more books (didn't die, just moved on to other stuff like cheer-leading the Nazis). As it is, the 420 plus pages he did write take long enough to get through, plenty of interesting ideas but sometimes you just have to accept, on the third or fourth re-reading of a sentence or paragraph, that you can't make sense of it and move on. In other words, not light reading.


Now reading Blood Meridian, 100 or so pages, wonderfully poetic, utterly brutal and debauched.

[Ukjent]

After the dull Inferno its over to Andrzej Sapkowski Time of Contempt. It better be jawdropping for I have been waiting years for this one.

[Hound]

About to start American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I liked Neverwhere (a lot) and loved Stardust, so I'm curious about AG.

[Mentalist]

 Graablick, on 23 June 2013 - 05:43 PM, said:

After the dull Inferno its over to Andrzej Sapkowski Time of Contempt. It better be jawdropping for I have been waiting years for this one.

If's very AFfC-sh, actually. still good, but by no means the highpoint of the series.

[Chance]

 Hound, on 23 June 2013 - 06:10 PM, said:

About to start American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I liked Neverwhere (a lot) and loved Stardust, so I'm curious about AG.

Its better but its not as likable.

[Ukjent]

Didn't fall for AG, but I'm going to buy Stardust someday. Think that I am one of the few who likes the movie.

[Puck]

I decided to be daring and pick up a female urban fantasy author, even though I had sworn not to do so ever again. So I'm reading Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard now. It's your typical magical murder mystery.. set in the Aztec empire. I'm ~100 pages in and I've yet to roll my eyes and go 'Come on, did we really need that?', which bodes well for the remainder of the trilogy. The writing is smooth, what I should see coming I mostly don't because I'm engrossed in the story, and I'm rather charmed by the main character.

All in all, looking forward to reading on.

[stone monkey]

Okay, so I'm definitely not trying to revive this particular debate again but... well... you promised yourself never to read a female urban fantasy author again..? Really? Isn't that a little blinkered? And a textbook demonstration of exactly the problem that female authors have in the genre. Obviously, yes, most of them may not be to your taste, but surely Sturgeon's Law applies here, as it does in most things.

Given that male sf & fantasy authors must outnumber the female ones by 100-1 (a rough estimate, I admit), that means that the crap sf&f books written by men will vastly outnumber those written by women.

Not every female writer can be Ursula Le Guin or CJ Cherryh (or even Margaret Atwood on a good day), but there are still people like Lisa Tuttle or Pat Cadigan (or even Chris Moriarty - if you like weird physics/mathematics in your sf, which I absolutely do) knocking around. They're out there to be found if you know what you're looking for. It does seem a shame imo to write off the entire gender. And my feminist leanings also rebel against the very idea of doing so.

And tbh, I'd rather read a dozen Trudy Canavans than one Terry Goodkind... But, of course, I'd rather read neither. Perhaps it actually boils down to being more of an issue with your quality control than The Problem With Female Writers.

But yeah, sorry for the rant, but it struck me as a pretty outrageous (and outrageously wrongheaded) statement.

[polishgenius]

Never reading urban fantasy by a woman means you'll never read Kate Griffin's Urban Magic series. Your loss.

[Puck]

I'm sorry for being a textbook example of those who cause grief for female authors, but I stand by what I said. Trying to argue about the why and how much this makes me a bad bad person is futile. I have found, for me, that what themes a whole lot of female urban fantasy authors are trying to tell me does not interest me, and just in case you forgot, I'm biologically female, too, and no stranger to feminism issues, in many ways, included dealing with prejudices against girls in the area I study.

As far as I'm aware, none of the authors you mentioned are writing in the particular sub-genre I have said good bye to female authors in, thus sorry, but I've no idea what you are trying to tell me. Or rather, I do, but I'm afraid you're missing the point.