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Ben Nevis posted:So I'm almost done with Baru 3: Too Many Cormorants and while there's a lot going on my two favorite and least consequential items are the beginning of chapter 20, which I assume is taking a shot at audio book pronunciation issues and also imagining GB trying to research circumstances in which might sunburn their balls. I'm listening to it on audio, and absolutely lost my poo poo at the pronunciation one. "No one would pronounce my name that way," she said, as the narrator pronounced the name in precisely that way.
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Sep 15, 2020 18:19
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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1) by Becky Chambers - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZP64F28/ The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth's Past #2) by Cixin Liu - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R13OYU6/ Hyperion by Dan Simmons -$1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004G60EHS/
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Sep 15, 2020 19:14
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Kestral posted:I'm listening to it on audio, and absolutely lost my poo poo at the pronunciation one. I was thinking about this as a read it. Did she really? JFC. I wonder if this was influenced by the publisher wanting 'consistency'
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Sep 15, 2020 19:26
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I am a lurker of this thread popping in to say thank you for posting the recs and deals on Kindle books as it helped me fill up my library while I was reading Wheel of Time. The Broken Sword was a really great read. Currently I'm reading Binti novels and then plan to get to I Am Legend. Also, as someone who wondered about reading the Malazan series, the recent posts have convinced me to avoid it, so thanks for that too.
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Sep 15, 2020 19:33
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Not much progress on my SFL Archives read-through, ended up reading George RR Martin's Tuf Voyaging short story collection and the Bladerunner this past weekend. The GRRM Tuf Voyaging collection was good. I liked how Haviland Tuf was increasingly done with the Planet-of-Religious-Assholes behavior each time he revisited it to pay off the repair bill on his MacGuffin-spaceship. Bladerunner was very good, it should have been turned into a movie. As of now, my NEVER READ GEORGE RR MARTIN rule is back in effect. What little SFL Archives read-through progress I have made hit a stop because the resident reviewer-idiot of the SFL Archives, circa 1985-1986, Mark Leeper has gotten into my head, BotL style, with his latest review-reply. And since I can't travel back in time 34 yrs and 3 months to call him a dumbass who willfully ignores details to First Post! about things, venting here about it will have to do. ------------------------------ Date: 6 May 86 15:32:07 EDT From: RPK@COM.EXEC Subject: Star Wars About a year ago I saw the film "The Hidden Fortress", directed by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune. At the time, the newspaper review were suggesting that George Lucas used that film as at least part of the inspiration for his film "Star Wars". The plot: Some time in the feudal period of Japan, two lowly peasants are enlisted by a warrior and a girl traveling incognito. The mission is to help the girl return to her homeland with valuable information. They must travel in disguise, at times directly under the noses of enemy soldiers. In the end they succeed, and the peasants are called to the court of the princess, where she and the general, both now in full regalia, formally give their thanks. They're not as similar as "The Seven Samurai" and "The Magnificent Seven", but the connection is undeniable. Richard ------------------------------ ------------------------------ Date: 21 May 86 22:14:47 GMT From: mtgzz!leeper@caip.rutgers.edu (m.r.leeper) Subject: Re: Star Wars HIDDEN FORTRESS is out on cassette and I have been meaning to write a review of it. It actually is not that close to STAR WARS. It is mostly about the attempts to return a willful princess and her gold to her own country (from enemy territory). I don't think she is ever really captured by the enemy. The main characters are two humorous soldiers, a powerful stranger who protects the princess, and the princess, herself. The stranger is played by Toshiro Mifune. I am pretty sure one of the guardians of the princess early in the film is Takashi Shimura, though I didn't see his name in the credits. (Shimura, whose name is pretty much unknown in this country, was the lead samurai in SEVEN SAMURAI, the dying official in IKIRU, and the scientist in a number of Toho's science fiction monster films.) Mark Leeper ...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper ------------------------------ quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Sep 16, 2020 |
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Sep 15, 2020 20:37
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Harold Fjord posted:I was thinking about this as a read it. Did she really? JFC. She did indeed. It was beat-for-beat exactly what happened when they changed readers for the Takeshi Kovacs audiobooks, a series where every single book has a scene where someone mispronounces the protagonist's name and he has to correct them (for the benefit of the reader). The new narrator read Kovacs's correction to the mispronunciation (KO-vach, not KO-vacks), then blithely returned to calling him Ko-vacks for the rest of the book. I've always wondered why the narrators of audiobooks with living authors don't bother to contact said authors and get a pronunciation guide.
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Sep 15, 2020 20:57
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boy the light brigade really beats you over the head with its message, i liked it, but drat
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Sep 15, 2020 21:15
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breadnsucc posted:boy the light brigade really beats you over the head with its message, i liked it, but drat I've never read a book quite so hyper-violent, let alone "hyper-violent and showing the trauma and other repercussions of said hyper-violence". That said, I definitely enjoyed it.
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Sep 15, 2020 21:37
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My copy of Piranesi has arrived. It's tiny. 235 pages.
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Sep 15, 2020 23:03
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I'm maybe a quarter of the way into Piranesi, I've got no idea what's going on, but god drat if it isn't incredibly soothing to read. It probably helps that Borges is one of my favourite authors.
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Sep 15, 2020 23:26
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Finished Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake. Happy with it. Very Stephen King-esque, down to the ending, but a pageturner with a lot of fun in it. Basic premise: we find a way to watch another planet in depth, studying their lifestyle, from a laboratory with a supporting community.
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Sep 16, 2020 00:55
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TheAardvark posted:Finished Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake. I’m reading Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden and it seems super reminiscent of RCW’s stories.
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Sep 16, 2020 01:21
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Yarrington posted:You may want to know that this gets much, much worse in a scene towards the very end of the series that's so bad had I known about it before getting 8000 pages in, I probably would have bailed on the entire series. I googled it. I had always intended to read past the first book and felt a little bad about never getting around to it, but with the above discussion and now this I've changed my mind. Thank you.
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Sep 16, 2020 03:44
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Finished up Ballistic Kiss by Richard Kadrey, the latest in the sandman slim series. Pretty great book, albeit a little weird. The pros would be I love the story idea. Stark has decided to try and be more than a monster, and is taking meds and having sessions to deal with his PTSD. That unto itself is a great character development. Kadrey also introduces probably the first non binary character in the series as well. It's handled fairly well. Stark is completely lost on how it works, but he tries his best. The only real con to the book is the big evil bad guys plans make little to no sense. It kinda fits with em being a big secret club, but the whole time they were going on about their big plan there was just me going 🧐. Still, great read. The ending is nice, and manages to be both scary and nice at the same time, and makes sure it's gonna be one hell of a long wait till the next book.
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Sep 16, 2020 05:11
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TheAardvark posted:Finished Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake. Is that the one with the lobster aliens? I've heard good things about it...
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Sep 16, 2020 05:12
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I googled it. I had always intended to read past the first book and felt a little bad about never getting around to it, but with the above discussion and now this I've changed my mind. Thank you. You should avoid history books while you are at it as well. It is kinda interesting with respect to the Malazan series how all the other atrocities are not as seen as bad as the rapes when discussed here. As examples an entire army is betrayed and crucified alive, multiple genocides (including rerouting a river to drown an entire dimension), a house literally stacked with corpses, a refugee train of kids having to eat their own, an army of cannibals that eat the losing army (dead and alive). (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 16, 2020 05:15
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Cardiac posted:You should avoid history books while you are at it as well. I don’t really see how this follows?
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Sep 16, 2020 05:36
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Cardiac posted:You should avoid history books while you are at it as well. American media has trained us that physical violence is good. But also there's a point that sexual violence is more... forget media, it hits us harder and is in general way more unpleasant, so not to say that the stuff you're describing is good, but it doesn't hit as hard as the hobbling does. e: Oh and "you should avoid history books while you're at it" this is disingenuous and rude, please don't do it
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Sep 16, 2020 05:45
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Cardiac posted:You should avoid history books while you are at it as well. Yeah, go gently caress yourself, thanks. EDIT: There are extremely valid reasons why people might be put off by sexual violence in particular that wouldn't likely apply to, say, genocide or cannibalism. Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Sep 16, 2020 |
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Sep 16, 2020 06:05
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Cardiac posted:You should avoid history books while you are at it as well. I googled this and found some pretty nasty sexualised violence. I'd like to know which history book includes descriptions of cutting womens' toes off and making them have sex with anyone (or any dog) who wants it. (I admit that this description might be wrong, as it's just based on the Malazan wiki page; feel free to correct me.) Also, now seems a good time to remind people of a forum rule: quote:Similarly, intelligent discussion of sensitive topics-- race, gender, sexuality, etc. -- is encouraged, when relevant to the discussion of a book. However, being stupid or lazy or bigoted in discussion of such topics will be discouraged. Strongly.
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Sep 16, 2020 06:10
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Safety Biscuits posted:I googled this and found some pretty nasty sexualised violence. I'd like to know which history book includes descriptions of cutting womens' toes off and making them have sex with anyone (or any dog) who wants it. Dear God, was put off by the first book but moreso by this. I think, aside from all the other v valid stuff people have pointed out, sexual assault in books like Malazan is very often either a "women in refrigerators" thing where it is just fodder for another characters development/motivations or just handled really poorly. Also, history is a thing that actually happened, SFF writers have to choose to include sexual assault. Often when they do it feels like they're checking off a grimdark checklist or couldn't think of something to motivate a character r to seek revenge. This is by no means always the case, but I think it's often symptomatic of the kind of SFF writing I'm not really interested in.
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Sep 16, 2020 06:23
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RIP ZEEZ
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That reminds me, I had to leave a "Pretend this didn't happen" review for the 2019 Black Company novel. Prior to that ? Totally tame compared to Malazan, just one "yeah, we suck, I just don't usually mention it" comment in the first book.
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Sep 16, 2020 06:47
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Man, I dropped the first Malazan book part-way in to the free samepl because it seemed like such a mess and these posts are making clear that that didn't even scratch the surface of this GURPS-campaign-turned-book-series clusterfuck and the bad content within.
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Sep 16, 2020 06:58
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Safety Biscuits posted:I googled this and found some pretty nasty sexualised violence. I'd like to know which history book includes descriptions of cutting womens' toes off and making them have sex with anyone (or any dog) who wants it. I had to read Geoffrey Robertson's book about crimes against humanity for a human rights class last year, and believe me, you do not want to know what went on in Pinochet's prisons. But yeah, there's a difference between documentation of real horrors and people willingly writing/reading made-up ones. I mean, whatever floats your boat, but no thanks for me. Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Is that the one with the lobster aliens? I've heard good things about it... Yep, I finished it recently and it's really good. Not mindblowingly great, just a very well put together sci-fi thriller that I found a real enjoyable pageturner and which will rank near the top of my best books of the year.
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Sep 16, 2020 07:05
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Never heard of Malazan before this page, but I still had to google to see what the deal was with the scene in question. I found this (spoilers in URL) overly long  that's pretty much what you'd expect. Tl;dr: Erikson wrote that scene because he has Big Things To Say about the human condition, and definitely not because he's an oafish blowhard who wrote something prurient for prurience's sake. So, gonna skip that dude's books altogether.I picked up Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Virtual Light when they were just on sale. Just finished CZ. I got a kick out of Gibson basically describing Instagram filters incidentally. Looking forward to the other two.
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Sep 16, 2020 13:31
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foutre posted:I think, aside from all the other v valid stuff people have pointed out, sexual assault in books like Malazan is very often either a "women in refrigerators" thing where it is just fodder for another characters development/motivations or just handled really poorly. It's frequently not even the fridging thing - Erikson just uses rape as a shorthand to indicate that some people are bad. Another example that I didn't describe in detail when I made that earlier post: There's an assassin guy who has come across a group of bandits in a desert, and they're part of a political rebellion that's a threat to his goals, so he's going to go kill them. He leaves for a bit, then comes back to their desert camp, only to find that they'd somehow in the meantime found 4 women in the desert, raped them, then murdered them. There's no description of the women or where they came from or anything, since by the time assassin guy gets there, the women are dead, and Erikson just describes the assassin guy seeing some raped women's corpses before continuing with the fight scene and never mentioning these women again. It's not "women in fridges" because that trope refers to something that would give a character motivation, while in this instance (and frequently in this book), it's just casually mentioned to indicate badness and then completely forgotten, both by the characters and by Erikson. I'm pretty mad that I spent like 60 dollars on the ebook collection after reading the first novel.
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Sep 16, 2020 14:30
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Cannot for the life of me remember which series it was, but I in the first book badass warrior woman is doing cool grim stuff and it was great, and then a couple of chapters into the next book badass warrior woman–now more powerful–orders her soldiers to rape a prisoner and it's described as "oh a very brutal decision but whacha gonna do!  " (paraphrased) and it's just the worst case of anything like that I've ever seen.
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Sep 16, 2020 14:54
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https://twitter.com/alexriesart/status/1306248597361422336
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Sep 16, 2020 16:36
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a foolish pianist posted:It's frequently not even the fridging thing - Erikson just uses rape as a shorthand to indicate that some people are bad. Another example that I didn't describe in detail when I made that earlier post: I suspect Erikson was going for some sort of deconstruction of the Noble Savage myth with some of the more awful stuff, but it was unnecessary and terrible.
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Sep 16, 2020 16:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:My copy of Piranesi has arrived.
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Sep 16, 2020 17:07
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duuuuuuude thanks for the heads up. do Inferno next.
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Sep 16, 2020 17:28
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a foolish pianist posted:It's frequently not even the fridging thing - Erikson just uses rape as a shorthand to indicate that some people are bad. Oof welp that's even worse. "Shorthand for people being bad" is a v good way of putting it.
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Sep 16, 2020 17:29
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Fallom posted:I’m reading Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden and it seems super reminiscent of RCW’s stories. This sounds incredible! Just bought it. Don't know how I missed it, I loved Children of Time. I've noticed a lot of RCW's stuff I want to read now isn't available on Kindle unfortunately. Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Is that the one with the lobster aliens? I've heard good things about it... Yup. I recommend it.
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Sep 16, 2020 17:41
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expanse book announcement happening in less than an hour. https://www.crowdcast.io/e/expansebook9
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Sep 16, 2020 18:07
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Started reading To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (Christopher Paolini) yesterday, which is a brick of a book (800+ pages, kindle info says), but at least you can't accuse it of a slow start. Our protagonist encounters an alien artifact/lifeform by the second chapter, and then things proceed to go all to hell. The action is well under way before the kindle free sample ends. Enjoying the ride so far.
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Sep 16, 2020 18:28
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I've got a paperback copy of the first edition that I bought in like 1991. It was one of my favorite books as a pre-teen.
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Sep 16, 2020 18:29
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TheAardvark posted:Finished Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake. Good call on it being Stephen King-esque, I wouldn’t have thought to make that comparison but in retrospect I can definitely see that. Not in the subject matter but the characters and how they interact.
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Sep 16, 2020 18:47
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I hated Blind Lake! And it made me afraid to re-read Spin because I might hate it too.
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Sep 16, 2020 18:58
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General Battuta posted:I hated Blind Lake! And it made me afraid to re-read Spin because I might hate it too. Out of curiosity, how do you feel about Stephen King?
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Sep 16, 2020 18:59
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I like him a lot, often. He has this yarny storyteller’s voice that makes even his bad work feel very human.
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Sep 16, 2020 19:04
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