Read Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang, which uh I though I’d read before? Maybe I just looked at the cover??? Anyway, lots of babies in the early stories then later stories read like extended old Doctor Who episode arcs (good).
The intelligent ships make me want to reread Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders series again, and not to reread Use of Weapons or any of the other tedious Culture wankery.
recently finished a run of mishima (death in midsummer, temple of the golden pavilion, a sailor~). now rereading blood meridian and a history of numbers (number: the language of science) because I am dense when it comes maths and I really wish I weren’t
Read Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore on the plane and it was pretty awful. It read like weird self-insert fanfiction about San Francisco with the main character/author wanting to fuck what seems to be a literal personification of Google.
The last book I (tried to) read was Ready Player One. I sure am good at picking out wildly self-indulgent books huh
Finishsed Rendezvous with Rama. I understand Clarke was a physicist? It’s quite hard sci-fi, a wonderfully-consistent boring story. Nothing happens, then the ‘other titles from this publisher’ page leads with RAMA 2…
I ran out of library donation book sale books, so I went back.
I started reading She but I think I might just be burnt out on 19th century Englishmen, especially those adventuring through Africa.
Ringworld has nice pacing, weird 70s progressive sexism, and uh a million deus ex machinas. The first half of the book (let’s go to the Ringworld) is better than the second (so what’s this Ringworld all about then).
The rest of the Ringworld books are boring pseudo engineering treatises on the ring world (more like the second half of the first book), and not fun or good at all.
Will skip (more Ringworld). It’s a pity that literally everything else in the book is more interesting than the titutal artifact.
I read the Book of the New Sun. Loved the surreal world and the way it reads like someone trying to translate a text from a foreign culture. Many of the set pieces were remarkable.
I went in knowing there’s supposed to be a subtextual story going on in the background but can’t say I really caught it. I read it as a picaresque novel but it seems like many of the episodes are tied together. There were also whole sections where I’m not sure why they were included (the entire interlude where Severian is judging the stories). I don’t understand the motivations of half the characters, which I understand is the nature of this being Severian’s memoir, but it seems like you can “solve” this to some extent. Does it really require a reread to understand the full narrative?
There are 3 routes from here:
4 Take Extract of Alzabo before consuming the flesh of Tulpa
I found Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success in a bookstore yesterday, bought it, and read through it last night. I tend to read these light non-fiction books in a single sitting. Do others also? Is that why you see so many of these in airport bookstores?
is there any good new sci-fi or fantasy I’m missing out on right now, because I haven’t picked up anything out of the realm of YA that I really care for in years ;-: I want Heavy Themes Literature With Swords again, damnit
How new are we talking? I can adjust recommendations from there
Just my little PSA anytime Gladwell’s name comes up
@BIGHEADMODE told me that @Tulpa’s favorite work of fantasy is really Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and would he lie?!
how dare you accuse me of that
i’m interested in seeing what the scope of both of those genres are within like the last decade/half decade. i have a pretty good imprint for early sci-fi and fantasy with dudes like moorcock and scalzi (are they contemporaries? i dunno, sci fi aint my game) but i find it hard to criticize something i’m not invested in recently.
I just finished Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. I loved it.
Now I’ve started reading Choke, it seems kind of unpalatable right after ECGtB. The fucks and frigs and shits just seem to make the sentences elongated and wobbly, they don’t have any punch. It feels like an old man saying ‘I know how young people talk’.
hey, this seems like it’s as good a place as any to ask: can anyone recommend good treatments of the Early and High Medieval periods in europe that aren’t too dense for casual reading but still go beyond white people lamenting cultural decline and getting mad at “barbarians”