[Baco Xtath]

Studlock, on 20 July 2014 - 09:24 PM, said:

I feel like I should pick this Stover guy up. Swearing's one my favourite past times.

Stover is a god of swearing. And violence.

[QuickTidal]

Baco Xtath, on 20 July 2014 - 09:28 PM, said:

Studlock, on 20 July 2014 - 09:24 PM, said:

I feel like I should pick this Stover guy up. Swearing's one my favourite past times.

Stover is a god of swearing. And violence.

Yeah man, pick up HEROES DIE...it's fucking good stuff!

[Slow Ben]

Finally, FINALLY have had time to do some reading in the past few weeks.

Finally got to read Skin Game. I'd rank it in the middle somewhere. The characters were all great, Butchers still hilarious, but overall it was just a good, not great, book.


Read the Broken Empire by Lawrence. I enjoyed this series. Not groundbreaking writing or anything, but i really enjoyed the story, the characters and the "anti-hero".


Just finished The Dragons Path. This book was weird in the sense that there is no high's and lows, no climaxes or slogging through pages. It basically just keeps an even keel from start to finish. But it was good enough to start the next one.

After this series i"ll finally get to Red Country.

[Abyss]

Studlock, on 20 July 2014 - 09:24 PM, said:

I feel like I should pick this Stover guy up. Swearing's one my fucking favourite past times.

Baco Xtath, on 20 July 2014 - 09:28 PM, said:

Studlock, on 20 July 2014 - 09:24 PM, said:

I feel like I should pick this Stover guy up. Swearing's one my favourite past times.

Stover is a god of swearing. And bloody mad fucking violence.

Fixed and fucking fixed. Stover style.

[Tattersail_]

I finished Royal Assassin this weekend. I got to say, up until the last chapter I really enjoyed the book. 95% of it was just awesome. Then she ruined the ending. It could have went in multiple directions and at least half of those I would have been happy with, but I felt like she didn't know what to do and chose a cop out. I loved the book, don't get me wrong but I hated the ending.

Spoiler

Why? I cannot put my finger directly on it but I will give it a try.

First thing that comes to mind is that he gives up after two beatings. That is no good whatsoever.

The second is Burrich talking to Nighteyes. Giving up all his honour and giving into something he hates, on an off chance that something he "heard" would work. What if it didn't? Then it is a gamble with Fitz's life.

Thirdly, why couldn't Burrich capture Nighteyes and show people that Fitz had trained a wolf since he was a boy, that he saved him from a trap or something and the wolf has been loyal ever since?

Lots of things made me enjoy the book, but the ending spoiled it. Now, Fitz is dead and if people see him they will know somethings amiss. So now, this poor boy, who grew up lonely, is all alone once more.

Also Molly got with Hands I reckon.

[Serenity]

Over the weekend I finally finished Caesar's Women, the 4th book in McCullough's 'Masters of Rome' series. Didn't like this one as much as the previous three - I thought it was brilliant in parts but it took ages to get going and the focus on laws and politics made it a bit tedious in places. Could've done with a good edit, imo.

And now, because someone I know is reading it for the very first time, I'm re-reading Gardens of the Moon. Third time through, like meeting an old friend.

[QuickTidal]

Tattersail_, on 21 July 2014 - 08:55 AM, said:

I finished Royal Assassin this weekend. I got to say, up until the last chapter I really enjoyed the book. 95% of it was just awesome. Then she ruined the ending. It could have went in multiple directions and at least half of those I would have been happy with, but I felt like she didn't know what to do and chose a cop out. I loved the book, don't get me wrong but I hated the ending.

Spoiler

Why? I cannot put my finger directly on it but I will give it a try.

First thing that comes to mind is that he gives up after two beatings. That is no good whatsoever.

The second is Burrich talking to Nighteyes. Giving up all his honour and giving into something he hates, on an off chance that something he "heard" would work. What if it didn't? Then it is a gamble with Fitz's life.

Thirdly, why couldn't Burrich capture Nighteyes and show people that Fitz had trained a wolf since he was a boy, that he saved him from a trap or something and the wolf has been loyal ever since?

Lots of things made me enjoy the book, but the ending spoiled it. Now, Fitz is dead and if people see him they will know somethings amiss. So now, this poor boy, who grew up lonely, is all alone once more.

Also Molly got with Hands I reckon.

Not to spoil anything, but some of that is dealt with in book 3. And some more of it in the second trilogy. Hobb is playing the long game.

[Maximiljen]

I'm reading Memories of Ice at this moment. For the first time.

This means:
1. I gotta stay away from most of the topics on this forum, also keep my eyes open for spoiler alerts.
B. I still got a helluva lot of Erikson's Malazan work just waiting for me - I could say I'm all booked up for the next months or so.

First-time reading something is like kissing someone for the first time: it happens only once. Yes, I'm in love with truisms.

[Abyss]

Maximiljen, on 21 July 2014 - 11:21 AM, said:

I'm reading Memories of Ice at this moment. For the first time.

This means:
1. I gotta stay away from most of the topics on this forum, also keep my eyes open for spoiler alerts.
B. I still got a helluva lot of Erikson's Malazan work just waiting for me - I could say I'm all booked up for the next months or so.
Tres. I WIN!

First-time reading something is like kissing someone for the first time: it happens only once. Yes, I'm in love with truisms.

Fixed, just because you're reading MoI for the first time and thus, your life is better.

[Salt-Man Z]

Studlock, on 20 July 2014 - 09:24 PM, said:

I feel like I should pick this Stover guy up. Swearing's one my favourite past times.

Fuck, even if it wasn't...

[Andorion]

So, I am chugging along nicely, 75% through Stover's Heroes Die, which is just as fucking good as it has been claimed, bloody hell Stover can write fight scenes, when I log into the forum, see a bunch of people starting of Malazan for the first time, with posts in GotM and MoI, and Abyss announces finishing Wurms of Blearmouth, and suddenly it hits me.."Bloody hell, everybody is reading Malazan and you are not!" And then i start looking at all the books, arranged lovingly, my hands begin to stray, and I etell myself No, Caine does not deserve this, its a bloody good series you are reading, with a cracking TBR to follow, you will continue as per plan" and the moment passes, or does it?

Why does SE have to be so good? why do his works have to be so addictive?


BTW, I just realised I spent the last 20 minutes talking to myself and then writing it down, so yeah I am losing it

This post has been edited by Andorion: 21 July 2014 - 04:46 PM

[Abyss]

Andorion, on 21 July 2014 - 04:46 PM, said:

So, I am chugging along nicely, 75% through Stover's Heroes Die, which is just as fucking good as it has been claimed, bloody hell Stover can write fight scenes, when I log into the forum, see a bunch of people starting of Malazan for the first time, with posts in GotM and MoI, and Abyss announces finishing Wurms of Blearmouth, and suddenly it hits me.."Bloody hell, everybody is reading Malazan and you are not!" And then i start looking at all the books, arranged lovingly, my hands begin to stray, and I etell myself No, Caine does not deserve this, its a bloody good series you are reading, with a cracking TBR to follow, you will continue as per plan" and the moment passes, or does it?

Why does SE have to be so good? why do his works have to be so addictive?


BTW, I just realised I spent the last 20 minutes talking to myself and then writing it down, so yeah I am losing it

So basically your conflict is Caine or Malazan.


No wonder you're losing it, i'm astounded you haven't headsploded as fuck already.

[D'rek]

Is it just me, or does this sub-forum feel a little lighter?

amphibian, on 18 July 2014 - 07:18 PM, said:

The entirety of Orson Scott Card's writing and speech is filled with questionable to downright bigoted ideology.

Wow, that's a pretty hyperbolic hate statement. You may not like him, but asserting that his entire body of work contains bigoted ideologies because you feel that *some* of the things he has written/said/done do is rude and dishonest... unless you've actually read every single one of the dozens of books and hundreds of published articles by him? If that's the case, then alright fair enough and I apologize.

Personally, I thought The Call of Earth was full of interesting and original cultural ideas which were in many ways completely opposite from fundamentalist christian views and wasn't bigoted towards any of them. That doesn't make me like the author as a person at all, nor does it change anything that he has written in other works, but to me it's an example that not everything he has written is the same and I wouldn't assume it is.

[Abyss]

I could be wrong, it's been years since i read it, but im fairly sure the book ENDER'S GAME contains no particular bigotry ( aside from the whole anti-bugism thing).

Scott himself has said some fairly close minded, bigotted things publicly and he's been rightly painted for it, but for accuracy's sake, i don't think it was in everything he's ever written ever.

[polishgenius]

Abyss, on 21 July 2014 - 04:59 PM, said:

So basically your conflict is Caine or Malazan.


No wonder you're losing it, i'm astounded you haven't headsploded as fuck already.

The answer to this conflict, of course, is Dresden.

[amphibian]

D, on 21 July 2014 - 06:58 PM, said:

Wow, that's a pretty hyperbolic hate statement. You may not like him, but asserting that his entire body of work contains bigoted ideologies because you feel that *some* of the things he has written/said/done do is rude and dishonest... unless you've actually read every single one of the dozens of books and hundreds of published articles by him? If that's the case, then alright fair enough and I apologize.

Personally, I thought The Call of Earth was full of interesting and original cultural ideas which were in many ways completely opposite from fundamentalist christian views and wasn't bigoted towards any of them. That doesn't make me like the author as a person at all, nor does it change anything that he has written in other works, but to me it's an example that not everything he has written is the same and I wouldn't assume it is.

I've read most of the Ender/Bean series and one Alvin book (basically a good dose of his major original works). I've also read more than a double handful of his terrible and bigoted articles on various topics.

The Call of the Earth is the second book of the Homecoming series which is the retelling of the Book of Mormon, which is full of bigotry and has produced churches and splinter churches that are for the most part, exclusivist and oppressive to many members and non-members. I've not read any of these books and I've no desire to - because he's a bad writer, in a way that's beyond bad mechanics of writing. Orson Scott Card writes in a way that makes bad ideas look good in a way that's more palatable than Terry Goodkind, yet they're on the same level.

His writing - that I've encountered, I'll give you that caveat - is full of "white boy, who is a Jesus/Joseph Smith analog, suffers abuse at the hands of others, but still grows up and rescue people from a major problem by establishing or assisting the creation of a totalitarian system". This is multiple books and multiple different storylines that end up this same way. The Alvin book I read had that same narrative going on plus serious problems with making "race" a component of magic and wandering over the line of bad cultural appropriation, rather than historical homage, in regards to tribal figures and non-white people.

A reddit commentor actually sums this up well with other books I haven't read (kleinbl00's comment): http://www.reddit.co...authors/c8tagid

I may dislike Brandon Sanderson as an author - in part because of the subtle Mormon slant in his writing - but he's a good person in a way that OSC isn't and never has been. Sanderson isn't a bigot in his personal life or in any of his writings.

[Salt-Man Z]

amphibian, on 21 July 2014 - 09:54 PM, said:

His writing - that I've encountered, I'll give you that caveat - is full of "white boy, who is a Jesus/Joseph Smith analog, suffers abuse at the hands of others, but still grows up and rescue people from a major problem by establishing or assisting the creation of a totalitarian system". This is multiple books and multiple different storylines that end up this same way. The Alvin book I read had that same narrative going on plus serious problems with making "race" a component of magic and wandering over the line of bad cultural appropriation, rather than historical homage, in regards to tribal figures and non-white people.

A reddit commentor actually sums this up well with other books I haven't read (kleinbl00's comment): http://www.reddit.co...authors/c8tagid

I had more to say but thought better of it, and I'll just leave this note: The entire point of Treason (and The Worthing Saga, to an extent) is the liberation of an entire planet (or planets, in Worthing) from a totalitarian system (without replacing it with another one.) Half of that Reddit list is really a stretch.

[D'rek]

amphibian, on 21 July 2014 - 09:54 PM, said:

The Call of the Earth is the second book of the Homecoming series which is the retelling of the Book of Mormon, which is full of bigotry and has produced churches and splinter churches that are for the most part, exclusivist and oppressive to many members and non-members. I've not read any of these books and I've no desire to - because he's a bad writer, in a way that's beyond bad mechanics of writing. Orson Scott Card writes in a way that makes bad ideas look good in a way that's more palatable than Terry Goodkind, yet they're on the same level.

I know just about nothing about the Book of Mormon. Did it have feminism, sympathetic gay and disabled characters (who had way more depth to them than just that about them), and a pervading slant of "no matter how much or how long you try, humans are inevitably violent jerkfaces who can't be trusted to live peacefully with each other, ever" ?

Though if the Book of Mormon has a diaspora of the true mormons sort of moment I can totally see a parallel of that with when the robot satellites destroy the main city so the people it has been manipulating into concentrating their genes will scatter out across the world.

Since I'm not a Mormon and don't care about Mormons one way or another, it doesn't bother me at all if Homecoming was an adaptation of the Book of Mormon. Lion King is Hamlet, O Brother Where Art Thou is the Odyssey, Night's Daughter is The Magic Flute, etc. Lots of old stories, including religious ones, are still good stories. If someone says "hey, I took this classic story from the Book of Mormon but replaced the sermony god parts with a robot AI in space that can control your brains through neural gene manipulation, instead of whatever historical religious place you've heard of too many times it's set on a planet with an unusual social structure and bizarre combination of low- and high-tech, and instead of just allegories the characters have holograms and laser guns" that pretty much sounds like an awesome time to me!

amphibian, on 21 July 2014 - 09:54 PM, said:

I may dislike Brandon Sanderson as an author - in part because of the subtle Mormon slant in his writing - but he's a good person in a way that OSC isn't and never has been. Sanderson isn't a bigot in his personal life or in any of his writings.

Like I said though, this is not about liking or disliking the man himself, simply about not automatically painting all his written work with the same brush based on just a few, regardless of what he is like personally.

If SE, 10 years from now, decides to become a social activist speaking out and writing in favour of, let's say, apartheid-esque laws in Britain, that wouldn't mean that suddenly all of MBotF is a bigoted bunch of books, too.

This post has been edited by D'rek: 22 July 2014 - 12:52 AM

[Gwynn ap Nudd]

D, on 22 July 2014 - 12:39 AM, said:

Lion King is Hamlet, O Brother Where Art Thou is the Odyssey, Night's Daughter is The Magic Flute, etc. Lots of old stories, including religious ones, are still good stories. If someone says "hey, I took this classic story from the Book of Mormon but replaced the sermony god parts with a robot AI in space that can control your brains through neural gene manipulation, instead of whatever historical religious place you've heard of too many times it's set on a planet with an unusual social structure and bizarre combination of low- and high-tech, and instead of just allegories the characters have holograms and laser guns" that pretty much sounds like an awesome time to me!

I agree with this part, without venturing into the OSC debate. And many of the stories published are either new versions of old stories or heavily influenced by them.

Randomish examples, "God Knows" and "Live from Golgotha" are great reads IMO and both were based around parts of the Bible.

[Studlock]

I feel like when you write Hamlet's Father you've retroactively ruined all of your previous work and proactively ruined any future work.