[Tiste Simeon]

Worry, have you read Tender is the Flesh? I feel like it's something you'd appreciate. I will not use the word "enjoy" because it's definitely not the right word for that particular novel, but I think it's something that you would get a lot out of.

[JPK]

 Tiste Simeon, on 08 October 2024 - 05:38 PM, said:

Worry, have you read Tender is the Flesh? I feel like it's something you'd appreciate. I will not use the word "enjoy" because it's definitely not the right word for that particular novel, but I think it's something that you would get a lot out of.

It also appears to be on sale right now.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

 Tiste Simeon, on 08 October 2024 - 05:38 PM, said:

Worry, have you read Tender is the Flesh? I feel like it's something you'd appreciate. I will not use the word "enjoy" because it's definitely not the right word for that particular novel, but I think it's something that you would get a lot out of.

And if you can read Spanish (Worry iirc has mentioned working with immigrants in the American southwest) that's what it was originally written in---the title is Cadáver exquisito. Amazon has the Spanish version 17% off, IDK if JPK saw a better sale elsewhere.

Quote

En esta despiadada distopía - tan brutal como sutil, tan alegórica como realista-, Agustina Bazterrica inspira, con el poder explosivo de la ficción, sensaciones y debates de suma actualidad.

Huh, I don't know Spanish but I only had to look up a couple of words (esta = this, despiadada = ruthless, poder = power, and... "suma actualidad" = idiom for "highly topical", "very current"..). "In this ruthless dystopia, as brutal as it's subtle, as allegorical as it's realistic---Augustina Bazterrica inspires, with the explosive power (not exploding powder) of fiction, sensations and debates that are very current." )

[worry]

 Tiste Simeon, on 08 October 2024 - 05:38 PM, said:

Worry, have you read Tender is the Flesh? I feel like it's something you'd appreciate. I will not use the word "enjoy" because it's definitely not the right word for that particular novel, but I think it's something that you would get a lot out of.

Broseph, it arrived at my door last week and is next on my list.

[JPK]

 Azath Vitr (D, on 08 October 2024 - 10:22 PM, said:

 Tiste Simeon, on 08 October 2024 - 05:38 PM, said:

Worry, have you read Tender is the Flesh? I feel like it's something you'd appreciate. I will not use the word "enjoy" because it's definitely not the right word for that particular novel, but I think it's something that you would get a lot out of.

And if you can read Spanish (Worry iirc has mentioned working with immigrants in the American southwest) that's what it was originally written in---the title is Cadáver exquisito. Amazon has the Spanish version 17% off, IDK if JPK saw a better sale elsewhere.

$2.99 on Kobo or Kindle. May be region locked though.

[Tiste Simeon]

 worry, on 08 October 2024 - 10:59 PM, said:

 Tiste Simeon, on 08 October 2024 - 05:38 PM, said:

Worry, have you read Tender is the Flesh? I feel like it's something you'd appreciate. I will not use the word "enjoy" because it's definitely not the right word for that particular novel, but I think it's something that you would get a lot out of.

Broseph, it arrived at my door last week and is next on my list.

I would love to hear a Worry breakdown of this book. It is not comfortable to read in any ways shape or form, but it is a fascinating thought experiment.

[polishgenius]

Every so often I run into a book that turns out to be exactly what I wanted from it while also being unexpected and surprising. The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers is one of those. The premise: a family curse and missing mother leave a girl and her uncles ten years to find a way out of it before a mysterious, magical and very nasty nemesis comes to take her- sets up as quite thriller-y, but the writing and presentation leans towards the fairytale stylings of Catherynne Valente or that guy who wrote Sandman, with more than a touch of Night Circus on top. It somehow manages to feel both whimsical and urgent, which is a heck of a trick, and it nails a bunch of things that I specifically love.

This is Summers' debut, so I'll definitely be reading her next one. Might be my read of the year so far.




Before that I read The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson, which though very different oddly hits a similar dychotomy: the premise of a mysterious foundling child, left by the gods of the library, has a similarly Valente-esque magical feel to it, but it's actually a sufficiently-advanced-technology SF setting which touches on some deeply political plotting (and also, perhaps even moreso, trauma and how the main character deals with it). I loved it too, but here I did think that at the very end it struggled to keep the two sides of its premise together just a bit, some developments came almost out of nowhere at the expense of others dealt with almost off-screen when the book had been building them from the start. Still, really good. It's marketed as YA but I'm not really sure why apart from other books the author wrote are- it really aims no younger in tone or premise or themes than City of Stardust does.

This post has been edited by polishgenius: 12 October 2024 - 08:29 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Ha... did Amazon's AI set a trap for me?

Probably not; but the technological feasibility of the possibility amuses me...

I was just congratulating myself on making good time on the Chathrand Voyage series---finishing book one ahead of schedule, in less than half a month (of the three months I had to finish the series before canceling Audible Plus---but the first book is much shorter than the rest...). It's pretty good.

To my previous comments I'd add that there are some nice vivid action sequences (good balance between specificity and momentum) and, near the end of the book, a memorably imaginative variation on a sort of horror-adjacent fantasy trope that I don't remember seeing before:

Spoiler

the sorcerer hurls dismembered body parts onto the ship and each piece starts growing into a full bodied undead warrior... I also particularly liked the description of the mink running around picking up the body parts with his teeth and flinging them overboard, and then racing around and battling the undead warriors.

Good characterization, a bit of decent character development. Though some of the audiobook performer's voices detracted a bit from the characters: one voice was too silly and detracted from the character's pathos, and another was too slow and pedantic, a bit too cheesy, and just didn't sound very good.

On to the next book, and---now all the rest of the books in the series are available only until October 28th.

Amazon's AI could have inferred from my having listened to Redick's Fire Sacraments series (except of course for the forthcoming final book) that I'd also want to listen to his Chathram Voyage series... and known that it would be pulled without sufficient advance notice for me to not start the series. It could have correctly inferred from my listening history that I would not listen to book one of a series on Audible Plus unless the rest of the published books of the series were also available to stream for free with Audible Plus. (It's also possible that the "available until" disclaimer has been there for a long time and I just didn't notice before---though I doubt that. Still, most likely it's just a coincidence.)

So I asked myself: just how much do I want to finish this series? And the answer is... I'd be fine with stopping after the first book. Plenty of other appealing books on my to-listen-to list.

The question then was whether to start on the next book---knowing I wouldn't be able to finish the series, and probably wouldn't even finish that book---or move on to something else. The prospect of having to abandon the book right before the ending didn't seem appealing, but neither did spending an average of about three hours a day listening to it....

Then a crazy thought came to me: what if I listened at double speed? Does Audible have that? Turns out yes it does. But will it transform Michael Page's deep voice into a manic chipmunk / shitty Shakespearean motormouth? (I used to watch math lectures on Youtube at x2 speed where the professor already has a thick foreign accent, and with the chipmunkification on top of that it's kind of hilarious... though not too hard to follow, provided I pause it when necessary.) Apparently Audible uses one of the better, more advanced tempo altering algorithms, because there's no significant chipmunkifcation. Still, at x2 speed book two (also performed by Michael Page) sounded unpleasantly staccato, clipped, and a bit garbled in places. Not worth it, I told myself. But then I decided to find out how fast I could make it and still find it enjoyable---and settled on 1.8x. Did the calculation, and it turned out that at 1.8x speed and the number of hours I had already scheduled for it I would finish the whole series just in time. Ha-HA!, I said; checkmate, kismet!

The first few chapters of book two contain a lot of recap which I found boring (wish he'd just stuck all that into a preliminary chapter so I could've easily skipped it) so I decided to try x2 speed again. Guess since I'd become acclimated to x1.8 speed x2 no longer bothered me much and now that's what I've been listening at, since I do want to get back ahead of schedule just in case it gets disrupted by some unforeseen emergency. Writing is maybe slightly better than the first book on average so far. Some quotes I stopped to write down::

Quote

Spoiler

"I see the spectre of annihilation
Would you know where it resides? Look behind you then"

"Run and hide and eat dead things and be hunted by all creatures"

"had been at war with lavish clothing since she was old enough to ruin it. She was not a good Arquali girl but a bruising fighter with a conscript's temper and a grip to make a wrestler wince"

"A whole street of flowers[...] buried in blossoms"

"before all this lust for territory and hugeness"

"we'll never belong among those who belong"

"like water dripping in a cave forever"

"gaze like a bird hypnotized by the sway of the cobra's hood at the events that shaped my life"

"knew the iron at the heart of the reed"

"and he felt every point of mutilation, he was vanishing, vanishing into the bodies of the worms"

"a fumbling menace"

"a coagulate lump of infernal malice"

"and grimaced as the light throbbed in his fist"

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 12 October 2024 - 02:58 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

polishgenius, on 11 October 2024 - 11:00 PM, said:

Every so often I run into a book that turns out to be exactly what I wanted from it while also being unexpected and surprising. The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers is one of those. The premise: a family curse and missing mother leave a girl and her uncles ten years to find a way out of it before a mysterious, magical and very nasty nemesis comes to take her- sets up as quite thriller-y, but the writing and presentation leans towards the fairytale stylings of Catherynne Valente or that guy who wrote Sandman, with more than a touch of Night Circus on top. It somehow manages to feel both whimsical and urgent, which is a heck of a trick, and it nails a bunch of things that I specifically love.

This is Summers' debut, so I'll definitely be reading her next one. Might be my read of the year so far.

Colour me intrigued!

[JPK]

I managed to polish off THE VALLEY OF FEAR, the seventh Sherlock Holmes novel, over the weekend. One of my long term goals over 2024 was to finish up a massive 9 book omnibus narrated by Stephen Fry by the end of the year and I'm still on track for this. The books themselves are no real surprise, Sherlock and Watson are so ingrained into culture that I think it's hard to find someone that can't imagine a version of the duo at this point. That said, the books are archetypical for a reason and really have a bit of an ageless quality to them. Also, if you haven't listened to Stephen Fry as a narrator, you really need to fix that. He's just lovely to listen to and you can tell he has a passion for the material. I'd personally put him up there with Andy Serkis, if that says anything to you.

Next up I'm back into Cornwell with ENEMY OF GOD. I give it 90 minutes until I want to stab a particular knight, but we'll have to see.

[Abyss]

After a solid run through another ten chapters of THE SILT VERSES i was ready to start a new book. A random pick from my audible TRP had me start Vandermeer's AMBERGRIS trilo, but 30min in i was just not feeling it and switched over to THE CLOUD ROADS, bk 1 of Martha Wells' Raksura series. Much more what i was in the zone for. A few hours in and very enjoying it.

[polishgenius]

I'm not sure Ambergris in audio is a good idea anyway. In City of Saints and Madmen, one of the stories has enough footnotes to be difficult but even aside from that there's a lot done with the presentation - exchanges of letters printed in different typeset, that kind of thing (it's a very handsome book, I recommend it in papercopy if at all possible). Shriek I just can't really see it in audio at all- it's a biography written by a woman about her missing-presumed-gone brother, then annotated and corrected by that brother. With, iirc, a third set of occasional notes from the actual editor of the book, though I'm not 100% if I'm not confusing it with something else. In any case it's very back-and-forth and I find it hard to see how you'd effectively communicate it it audio.

[Tiste Simeon]

I have this day finished Silverthorn, the second in the Riftwar Trilogy. It was good but not as enthralling as the first one. I like that Pug is levelling up (still the dumbest name in fiction tbh) and it finished in a place that makes me think I'll definitely finish the trilogy but I may pick something else up as a palate cleanser first.

[JPK]

 polishgenius, on 16 October 2024 - 08:44 AM, said:

I'm not sure Ambergris in audio is a good idea anyway. In City of Saints and Madmen, one of the stories has enough footnotes to be difficult but even aside from that there's a lot done with the presentation - exchanges of letters printed in different typeset, that kind of thing (it's a very handsome book, I recommend it in papercopy if at all possible). Shriek I just can't really see it in audio at all- it's a biography written by a woman about her missing-presumed-gone brother, then annotated and corrected by that brother. With, iirc, a third set of occasional notes from the actual editor of the book, though I'm not 100% if I'm not confusing it with something else. In any case it's very back-and-forth and I find it hard to see how you'd effectively communicate it it audio.

PG, you are thinking of the right books. I've gone through all 3 Ambergris novels in both paper and audiobook format, and while I think it works alright in audio, I do strongly feel that paper is the better option overall and definitely for the first time through.

[Abyss]

 JPK, on 16 October 2024 - 03:08 PM, said:

 polishgenius, on 16 October 2024 - 08:44 AM, said:

I'm not sure Ambergris in audio is a good idea anyway. In City of Saints and Madmen, one of the stories has enough footnotes to be difficult but even aside from that there's a lot done with the presentation - exchanges of letters printed in different typeset, that kind of thing (it's a very handsome book, I recommend it in papercopy if at all possible). Shriek I just can't really see it in audio at all- it's a biography written by a woman about her missing-presumed-gone brother, then annotated and corrected by that brother. With, iirc, a third set of occasional notes from the actual editor of the book, though I'm not 100% if I'm not confusing it with something else. In any case it's very back-and-forth and I find it hard to see how you'd effectively communicate it it audio.

PG, you are thinking of the right books. I've gone through all 3 Ambergris novels in both paper and audiobook format, and while I think it works alright in audio, I do strongly feel that paper is the better option overall and definitely for the first time through.

All noted, ty both.
The earbook format wasn't the problem, so much as the beginning of the story - priest returns to big city after time in jungle trying to convert natives, is naive bordering on dumb, horny bordering on pathetic, is taken advantage of by ne'er-do-wells - just didn't work for me. I found the character irritating, and to be fair it's a character type i typically find irritating. I can be patient if the book otherwise holds my attn but just wasn't feeling it.
Will try again eventually or shift to dead tree per your suggestions.

[JPK]

 Abyss, on 16 October 2024 - 03:38 PM, said:

 JPK, on 16 October 2024 - 03:08 PM, said:

 polishgenius, on 16 October 2024 - 08:44 AM, said:

I'm not sure Ambergris in audio is a good idea anyway. In City of Saints and Madmen, one of the stories has enough footnotes to be difficult but even aside from that there's a lot done with the presentation - exchanges of letters printed in different typeset, that kind of thing (it's a very handsome book, I recommend it in papercopy if at all possible). Shriek I just can't really see it in audio at all- it's a biography written by a woman about her missing-presumed-gone brother, then annotated and corrected by that brother. With, iirc, a third set of occasional notes from the actual editor of the book, though I'm not 100% if I'm not confusing it with something else. In any case it's very back-and-forth and I find it hard to see how you'd effectively communicate it it audio.

PG, you are thinking of the right books. I've gone through all 3 Ambergris novels in both paper and audiobook format, and while I think it works alright in audio, I do strongly feel that paper is the better option overall and definitely for the first time through.

All noted, ty both.
The earbook format wasn't the problem, so much as the beginning of the story - priest returns to big city after time in jungle trying to convert natives, is naive bordering on dumb, horny bordering on pathetic, is taken advantage of by ne'er-do-wells - just didn't work for me. I found the character irritating, and to be fair it's a character type i typically find irritating. I can be patient if the book otherwise holds my attn but just wasn't feeling it.
Will try again eventually or shift to dead tree per your suggestions.

Hold up, were you still in the first story - DRAYDEN IN LOVE? That's imo the worst story in CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN, though without spoiling anything specific I'll say that Drayden does have a twist that makes the story come together for me. When you come back to it, if you still don't like that first story I suggest skipping to the second to see if it lands any better for you.

[Abyss]

 JPK, on 16 October 2024 - 04:08 PM, said:

Hold up, were you still in the first story - DRAYDEN IN LOVE? That's imo the worst story in CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN, though without spoiling anything specific I'll say that Drayden does have a twist that makes the story come together for me. When you come back to it, if you still don't like that first story I suggest skipping to the second to see if it lands any better for you.

Yes/noted. Drayden was everything a protag needs to throw me right out of a story (aside but i had the same problem with SENLIN ASCENDS, glad i pushed thru).

[Briar King]

Finished Sarantium 2 last night. I did have some issues with these unlike Tigana’s epic brilliant tight riveting bounce a quarter off its ass. This set had some slow moving bits but that 1st half of bk 1 and then the last 100+ pgs of bk 2 were just muah *chefs kiss GGK

Was very hard not to pick up Last Light of the Sun right away yesterday so I could be right back in Jads world.. I’ve managed to put that off for now to prolong my GGK treat and pick up Michele West’s The Hidden City. Put away 47 pgs last night before ambien time.

[polishgenius]

Yeah, Drayden isn't a very likeable protagonist but since it's a novella/short story collection you don't have to live with him for very long.


Does the audiobook include all the stories the updated print edition does? I know the initial publication was I think four just the four novellas? I

This post has been edited by polishgenius: 16 October 2024 - 10:22 PM

[JPK]

 polishgenius, on 16 October 2024 - 10:21 PM, said:

Yeah, Drayden isn't a very likeable protagonist but since it's a novella/short story collection you don't have to live with him for very long.


Does the audiobook include all the stories the updated print edition does? I know the initial publication was I think four just the four novellas? I

It goes through THE STRANGE CASE OF X, which is where my print edition ends as well.

I do not have time for a reread... I do not have time for a reread...