[Abyss]

QuickTidal, on 20 March 2019 - 05:17 PM, said:

Tiste Simeon, on 20 March 2019 - 03:45 PM, said:

acesn8s, on 20 March 2019 - 01:18 PM, said:

75% of the way through The Dragonbone Chair. I should have reread this a long time ago.

That whole series is on Audible has anyone heard it and is it worth me spending 4 credits on? Quite a big fan of Tad Williams other stuff..

I've not listened on Audible yet, but the narrator is Andrew Wincott and he makes it sound like you're sitting around an old fireplace and an well-spoken gentleman is telling you a fairytale. Such an evocative voice.

As to the series, it's one of my all time favourites and has a place of honour on my shelf.

Briar King, on 20 March 2019 - 05:31 PM, said:

Abyss replies in 3, 2, 1

Great series, everyone should read it.
All four books of OTHERLAND too.
And TIGANA... BEST book EVER.

[Andorion]

Salt-Man Z, on 20 March 2019 - 08:11 PM, said:

Andorion, on 20 March 2019 - 04:09 PM, said:

So I am all caught up on Seanan McGuire's October Daye books, and IMO this series rates alongside Dresden and Rivers of London in terms of urban fantasy. Absolutely superb character writing.

Also today I finished the first book of McGuire's Incryptid series - Discount Armageddon and this seems like a more light take on urban fantasy which is still pretty entertaining.

Check out her "Indexing" series too, if you haven't already: two books about a team of operatives responsible for dealing with fairy tale narratives taking over the real world. Great stuff, and a really unique twist on the urban fantasy genre. I do still need to get into the two series you mentioned.

Indexing is on my radar but thanks for the reco.

October Daye has a real jolt for a start. I was not expecting the first book of a series to take such a sharp turn, and it really threw me. But McGuire really takes her characters seriously and invests in long term planning. Frankly this series deserves more attention.

[Aptorian]

Andorion, on 21 March 2019 - 05:32 AM, said:

Salt-Man Z, on 20 March 2019 - 08:11 PM, said:

Andorion, on 20 March 2019 - 04:09 PM, said:

So I am all caught up on Seanan McGuire's October Daye books, and IMO this series rates alongside Dresden and Rivers of London in terms of urban fantasy. Absolutely superb character writing.

Also today I finished the first book of McGuire's Incryptid series - Discount Armageddon and this seems like a more light take on urban fantasy which is still pretty entertaining.

Check out her "Indexing" series too, if you haven't already: two books about a team of operatives responsible for dealing with fairy tale narratives taking over the real world. Great stuff, and a really unique twist on the urban fantasy genre. I do still need to get into the two series you mentioned.

Indexing is on my radar but thanks for the reco.

October Daye has a real jolt for a start. I was not expecting the first book of a series to take such a sharp turn, and it really threw me. But McGuire really takes her characters seriously and invests in long term planning. Frankly this series deserves more attention.

Damn it people. I don't have time to read all these recommendations!

Edit oh dear. There's 12 October Daye books...

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 21 March 2019 - 06:35 AM

[Andorion]

Aptorian, on 21 March 2019 - 06:29 AM, said:

Andorion, on 21 March 2019 - 05:32 AM, said:

Salt-Man Z, on 20 March 2019 - 08:11 PM, said:

Andorion, on 20 March 2019 - 04:09 PM, said:

So I am all caught up on Seanan McGuire's October Daye books, and IMO this series rates alongside Dresden and Rivers of London in terms of urban fantasy. Absolutely superb character writing.

Also today I finished the first book of McGuire's Incryptid series - Discount Armageddon and this seems like a more light take on urban fantasy which is still pretty entertaining.

Check out her "Indexing" series too, if you haven't already: two books about a team of operatives responsible for dealing with fairy tale narratives taking over the real world. Great stuff, and a really unique twist on the urban fantasy genre. I do still need to get into the two series you mentioned.

Indexing is on my radar but thanks for the reco.

October Daye has a real jolt for a start. I was not expecting the first book of a series to take such a sharp turn, and it really threw me. But McGuire really takes her characters seriously and invests in long term planning. Frankly this series deserves more attention.

Damn it people. I don't have time to read all these recommendations!

Edit oh dear. There's 12 October Daye books...

And its still ongoing. The 13th is due this year.

[Zetubal]

Finally finished Water Sleeps (aka Black Company 8) this morning. Pretty good throughout the first 80 percent. Sleepy is a much more involved, though only marginally less self-absorbed protagonist than Murgen. Finally getting a narrator who's originally Taglian/Jaicuri offered some nice insight into people that thus far always seemed kind of unfathomable. The reveal that Taglians fearing the Company is just the result of some magical mindfuckery rather than anything that the Company forefathers ever did is actually kind of funny, I won't lie, and making Sleepy a native plus history/book geek feels like a far more natural way for the narrator to find out stuff about the past. So, the novel goes on and all in all it's looking pretty good. Fun, exhilarating moments of cleverness, clear goals, relatable motivations, some human drama - but then we get to the Glittering Plain.
First thing that set me off was the incredibly poorly handled "reveals" about the fact that there are several planes of existence and the history of the Plain + the Free Companies. After spending literally 4 full novels piecing together what might have happened, here we simply get a 7 pages dialogue between Sleepy and Ghost Murgen wherein the latter simply info-dumps the entire backstory/lore of the world on her. What's all the more jarring is the context in which this exposition dump is delivered: At that point, the company is about to enter the ancient nameless fortress, stone pillars containing glyphs have been revealed, Sleepy has been established as a capable, knowledgeable historian, she has her librarian/uber-historian Santaraksita with her AND Doj has shown willingness to share his knowledge. Put these factors together and Cook could easily have written the story in such a way as to have the characters piece together enough of the backstory through "archaeology", rather than just having Murgen force-feed the information to them. I mean...isn't that Chekov's gun? And as if the first info dump wasn't bad enough, there's another one when Sleepy, Tobo, Doj, and some others get mind-probed by Shivetya. Which is a whole new level of bad because the narration at that point has become really erratic and hard to follow. Also, Shivetya injecting the Company brothers with knowledge that will pop up in their minds whenever they need it is a really transparent trick to conveniently have them pull stuff out of their ass...Oh, and someone needs to kick Tobo's ass for getting poor old Goblin killed.
Overall decent entry that could've been a whole lot better if the closing act had been different.

On to Soldier's Live.

[Mentalist]

Interesting. Since I'm almost done with Kate Daniels, I'll give this new series a look-see.

[Aptorian]

On to book three of The Belgariad.

Only not quite. I couldn't figure out why there were so many titles in the bibliography of the Danish translation and why they differed so much from the English version.

Turns out there's ten books in the Danish version. They're entertaining enough but my to read list just got five books longer. I was hoping to finish the series by next week!

[Salt-Man Z]

Aptorian, on 21 March 2019 - 08:56 PM, said:

On to book three of The Belgariad.

Turns out there's ten books in the Danish version. They're entertaining enough but my to read list just got five books longer. I was hoping to finish the series by next week!

I assume the next 5 are the sequel series, The Mallorean?

[paran falcon]

QuickTidal, on 20 March 2019 - 05:17 PM, said:

Tiste Simeon, on 20 March 2019 - 03:45 PM, said:

acesn8s, on 20 March 2019 - 01:18 PM, said:

75% of the way through The Dragonbone Chair. I should have reread this a long time ago.

That whole series is on Audible has anyone heard it and is it worth me spending 4 credits on? Quite a big fan of Tad Williams other stuff..

I've not listened on Audible yet, but the narrator is Andrew Wincott and he makes it sound like you're sitting around an old fireplace and an well-spoken gentleman is telling you a fairytale. Such an evocative voice.

As to the series, it's one of my all time favourites and has a place of honour on my shelf.

This series is on my shelf as well. I thoroughly enjoyed it and have read it 2 or 3 times. I've not heard the Audible version yet but that may very well end up being the way I go through the series next time. It always struck me as a variation of the King Arthur story.

Speaking of King Arthur, I just started The Once and Future King on Audible on my drive home from work this afternoon. I read this in my teens and loved it. Just finished Ivanhoe on my drive to work this morning. I had not previously read that one but I really enjoyed. I have a feeling if I had tried to read it in print, I might have found it difficult. But listening to it was effortless, perhaps because I had to concentrate to decipher some of the verbiage and sentence structure. I nearly laughed many times as a phrase or sentence had me picturing scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I love to death. I'm on a total medieval kick now, it seems.

[Whisperzzzzzzz]

Sullivan's Age of Myth.

[Abyss]

O’Sullivan’s THE ROOK.Light urban fantasy spy-fi stuff, fun. Excellent earbook narrator makes it more engaging than the otherwise unsurprising story might be.About 75% thru and if it ends as strong as it’s been i’ll Probably jump right to book 2 unless the next EXPANSE arrives.

[Aptorian]

Abyss, on 22 March 2019 - 02:19 AM, said:

O’Sullivan’s THE ROOK.Light urban fantasy spy-fi stuff, fun. Excellent earbook narrator makes it more engaging than the otherwise unsurprising story might be.About 75% thru and if it ends as strong as it’s been i’ll Probably jump right to book 2 unless the next EXPANSE arrives.

I got about fifty, maybe a hundred pages into it and dropped it because I thought the premise was too stupid to be believable.

Spoiler

The idea that an amnesiac pretending to be a top official could last more than an hour in a spy hq is hard to follow.

This is sort of alleviated by her pre-amnesia making a tome with necessary information, but she barely glances at it before going in the first day.

I just thought it was stupid. It's a b-plot for a bad comedy

Does it pull it off?

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 22 March 2019 - 04:40 AM

[Aptorian]

Salt-Man Z, on 21 March 2019 - 09:50 PM, said:

Aptorian, on 21 March 2019 - 08:56 PM, said:

On to book three of The Belgariad.

Turns out there's ten books in the Danish version. They're entertaining enough but my to read list just got five books longer. I was hoping to finish the series by next week!

I assume the next 5 are the sequel series, The Mallorean?

Don't appear so. Though I hate spoilers so I haven't looked at the blurb in the later books description.

The books are relatively light. Only 150-160 pages. Nice little packages that you can devour in a day if you have a slow evening.

[Salt-Man Z]

Aptorian, on 22 March 2019 - 04:40 AM, said:

Don't appear so. ... The books are relatively light. Only 150-160 pages. Nice little packages that you can devour in a day if you have a slow evening.

Ah, I see my Belgariad copies are 300-400 pgs each (longer than I would have guessed!) and I see each book has 3-4 "parts", so they must have gotten split up along those lines.

[Abyss]

Goodreads appears to confirm the books are split in 2 in the Danish edition.

[Macros]

that seems reasonably common in continental versions of a lot of series.

Read books one and two of Amber.

I enjoyed book 1 a lot more than the first time I read it, not sure what I disliked about it. Guns of Avalon was a pretty good follow up, its caught me well enough that I'll finish the first 5, then step and before considering the second 5, which I gather are lesser in quality

[amphibian]

Macros, on 22 March 2019 - 07:19 AM, said:

that seems reasonably common in continental versions of a lot of series.

Read books one and two of Amber.

I enjoyed book 1 a lot more than the first time I read it, not sure what I disliked about it. Guns of Avalon was a pretty good follow up, its caught me well enough that I'll finish the first 5, then step and before considering the second 5, which I gather are lesser in quality

It's not so much lesser in quality as a character jump and the unfinished nature of the series due to his health problems. The cancer and kidney failure killed him before he was sixty.

[stone monkey]

Just finished Alastair Reynolds' Permafrost on the old electro-thingie. It's quite short (it is a novella, after all), surprisingly grim, packs a lot of meaty thinking about the technology and mechanics of time travel into its diminutive length, and, with a couple of interesting concepts that I hadn't seen before, is quite probably a new paradigm in time travel stories - I particularly like the way he handles temporal paradox. Also, at two and a bit pounds for the electronic version, it's comparatively cheap; which is not to be sniffed at.

Worth a punt if you have approximately three quid going spare.

Okay, so :

Spoiler

One thing I really liked about it was that it took future time travellers into account. i.e. from a future time travel programme that only exists because of the time travel programme our protagonist(s) belong to. By its very nature you can't predict the future, so all the precautions you take to preserve the past and change your future aren't necessarily worth a hill of beans if the people (I use the term advisedly - you'll see what I mean if you read it) from the future want to preserve their past. Sneaky.

And then there's the dog - that was a kick in teeth.

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 23 March 2019 - 01:52 AM

[Aptorian]

Added Permafrost to my Kindle library. No idea when I'll get around to reading it.

.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 23 March 2019 - 05:29 AM

[Mentalist]

Finished "Angels and Demons". What a twisted little drama this turned out to be.

Now I feel tempted to just power through a Da Vinci Code re-read (I originally read it in a day), and then also read "Last Symbol" (I got it as a gift many years ago; I should probably read it).

In commute, finished "Gunmetal Magic" . A bit too heavy on the emotional side for my tastes, but once the murdering of mythical things took centre stage, it became a good urbf fix. There's another novella in the volume, but I think I need to power through that at home, so I don't finish it in half my trip home from work and then get stuck with no book.

Once I'm done with that, next book off my shelf and into the work bag will be Stephenson's "Rise and Fall of the D.O.D.O."