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a foolish pianist posted:The Rook is incredibly aggravating in a men-writing-women-badly sort of way. There's lots of poo poo like this: Holy poo poo lmfao. I have a lot of sisters so I've always known how bullshit the... I guess you'd say, cultural conception of what men think women think like? is. It's so completely wrong its funny; it's like what a Tarantino villain would think. And this guy apparently wrote it straight out like it was clever Anyway yall mentioned the Goblin Emperor a while back and I gotta say I loved it. I really didn't think I'd ever get a fantasy book to make me feel sorry for a noble. They're always either just despite their unjust place in the world, or cartoon evil. But this guy is very relatable. Larry Parrish fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 09:19
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I really liked the first book of that new Cameron series but the second one has kind of just been sitting on my phone. I guess I just dont really like Saudi Afghanistan as a setting.
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Oct 20, 2019 12:16
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Silver2195 posted:It actually reminds me more of Dune than ASOIAF. The Mackenzies are basically just the Harkonnens, for example. And some basic setting elements, like a libertarian society on the Moon, come from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. its been a while since i read the first book (like, before the second book was even announced) but as i recall it wasn't 5 pages or so on the sexual dynamics of a group marriage. which moon is a harsh mistress does have.
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Oct 21, 2019 11:20
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Theres plenty of good bits in the Hyperion books but overall I wasnt terribly happy with them once I finished them
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Oct 24, 2019 01:05
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not sure how anyone got through all the remembrance of earth's past books and went 'oh yeah this dude is a commie'. the universe is such a horrible, hostile place. I really liked the first book and by the time I finished the third I loving hated it. anyway the concentration camp thing is whatever. if you need your sci fi author to be vocally anti-concentration camp you pretty much cant read any sci fi published in the last 20 years. theres very little leftist media out there in general, and in sci fi especially the best you can get outside of aforementioned soviet era novels is like, stuff by liberals that think big companies are bad.
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Oct 25, 2019 07:47
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Steel Frame was way better than I thought it would be.
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Oct 29, 2019 20:21
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[sets down book of the new sun] what the hell... the main character is a torturer? i cant read this lovely backwards book, theres no hero
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Oct 30, 2019 00:20
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Collateral posted:Having finished the Bob books I had wondered if the author intentionally made Bob an arrogant idiot with terrible skills and judgement. The reason I had for realising it was unintentional was that trite ending. I was really hoping the damaged transport stopped communicating and started heading towards the others system, after all the humans were onboard. The shear god drat arrogance of it, but ofc it wasn't it was his brilliance in shepherding the forever stupid humans who would just kill themselves without him. This is one of those book series I only read because I didnt have anything better to read and man it sucked. Hundreds of pages of basically the same two or three 'jokes' repeated, basically no interesting or fresh ideas presented, and just generally written somewhat shittily.
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Oct 30, 2019 05:02
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Cythereal posted:The next book I've started from my trip down the sci-fi/fantasy shelves at my library is interesting so far: Sea of Rust. It's a post-apocalyptic story with the twist that it's told from the perspective of the victorious robots. The AIs won the apocalyptic war with humanity. Humans are extinct. So... what happens now? I enjoyed it, I give it a 7 or maybe 8 out of 10. Not as good as Murderbot IMO. More stories about robots would be good.
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Nov 1, 2019 09:16
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I always rate books based on my attention span. If they take me more than a day or two to read, they're mediocre at best. Like I burned through steel frame in like 8 hours, broken up by work and sleep. Goblin Emperor was good but kind of boring and flowery (although that was the point) so it took me about twice as long. Whereas Kindle Unlimited trash takes me like a a week sometimes, if I dont just set it down forever. The crappier the novel, the more my attention wanders and I take breaks.
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Nov 6, 2019 09:04
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my bony fealty posted:this is not a good system friend i dont generally like those but I read fast so it works for me. if i dont enjoy a book series very much it takes me a few weeks to finish, if I do it takes a few days at most
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Nov 7, 2019 00:27
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Finished Healer's Road and I'm like half way through the sequel. I love these books. Call me sappy but I love stuff like this. Books set in the real world are hard for me to get into because its impossible to not constantly mutter about bougioise culture and liberalism the whole time. Somehow making it 'basically 1700s but also theres magic instead of TNT' makes it fine in my brain.
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Nov 7, 2019 02:44
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The prose doesnt really have an affect on how fast I read. Well, not totally true. Tolkien took me longer, but I also really hated reading it, so it's hard to tell how much was my mind glazing over. Anyway you just kind of get used to reading at a certain speed and the content is kind of irrelevant
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Nov 7, 2019 17:28
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Healer's Home was also very good but I'm starting to think that like a black hole, the time when Agna and Kei stop trying to tell the other what they want to hear is infinitely receding
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Nov 7, 2019 22:05
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General Battuta posted:I think knowing how fast you read is roughly on the same level as knowing your IQ to be technical, i only have a vague sense but I know it's a lot faster than most other people who dont also read constantly. at least, when I like the book
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Nov 7, 2019 22:25
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does anyone have anything to say about it that's not a feature list because tbh I just skip books where that's all people have to say, cuz they almost always suck and read like someone going through a checklist of stuff nerds would like
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Nov 8, 2019 23:19
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StrixNebulosa posted:Goon-written murder mystery in a city beset by the plague, where the protagonist is both the detective and murder victim. That is a much better description, thanks
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Nov 9, 2019 07:22
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that kind of seems to be all of them lately yeah. or my personal favorite, gay character who doesnt have any further character detail than being the gay one. healers road had gay people but there was an interesting detail where someone mentions that surrogates are really expensive. dunno if that was an intentional 'you gotta be rich to commit to being gay and having kids' kind of thing though.
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Nov 10, 2019 23:47
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For a more gunpowder feel I really liked The Thousand Names series and the Powder Mage series. The first is pretty much the story of fantasy Napoleon, and the second is a more traditional fantasy story that just steals a couple ideas from the French Revolution
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Nov 12, 2019 03:44
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So the third Zone War book is out, and it ends the series. Its decent, I guess. But in traditional military sci fi fashion (especially the current day/near future kind) theres a completely out of left field dig on filthy socialists and a bunch of prepper insanity at the end. The first book was way better than the last two. Its weird how many writers are like 'capitalism is bad, unless the board of directors are survivalist guys who can shoot good'
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Nov 16, 2019 07:28
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there are a hell of a lot of sci fi/fantasy writers who dont know how to write a failure unfortunately. Usually the closest you get is some kind of 'bad guy wins the fight but he forgot about Quirky Sidekick who slides in at the last second to even the odds'. so maybe mary sue complaints are overused but it's also generally pretty valid
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Nov 19, 2019 07:27
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well i hate to break it to you but that is in fact what mary sue means. it's being perfectly successful at everything.
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Nov 19, 2019 08:41
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in related news i never finished ninefox gambit because i hated it and found it pretty boring. kind of reminded me of reading a clockwork orange where im spending too much time trying to read the words instead of the narrative or subtext. I just had to be a jerk about the term because I have a brain disease
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Nov 19, 2019 17:11
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to be fair the stuff about the sorceresses kind of makes sense. nobody gives a poo poo about wizards so you only send your fourth daughter with the buck teeth to them, and once they get there, well, why wouldn't a wizard make themselves look perfect with magic. especially if your parents discard you as trash because they thought you wouldn't be able to get them a useful marriage.
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Nov 20, 2019 02:35
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genericnick posted:Finished a reread of Echnopraxia. It...really didn't hold up. I think it took something like 150 pages until I got sucked back into the story and Bruk's fedora atheism made the nerd discussions a bit more tedious than in Blindsight. Or maybe they just felt more tacked on? Still a lot of neat ideas though. And I couldn't help but read the last couple dialogues in the voice of ANCIENT REPTILIAN BRAIN so all is forgiven. i want ol' mr. du bois' VA to voice everything for me now
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Nov 22, 2019 08:01
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my favorite thing about ann leckie is dumb people getting triggered by the GENDERLESS SOCIETY of the radch but if you read closely its just that they don't have gendered nouns and our AI protagonist either doesnt care about the details of biologicals or got programmed to ignore it. which is a pretty cool way to make your hero volcel if you think about it. anyway im sad to hear about ann leckie's fantasy because I really liked the ancillary series
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Nov 23, 2019 17:03
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I'm gonna stick to my interpretation of Breq being programmed to ignore it, and interpreting that programming as being confused because its funnier. Although knowing sci fi authors theres probably a blog post somewhere explaining everything in concrete detail, and how I'm wrong and a jerk. I actually have read Provenance after I realized I'm an idiot, but anyway. I remember liking it at the time but I honestly cant tell you a single thing about it, besides characters thinking the Radch are jerks, and something vague about a spaceport chase scene. So I guess I'm gonna have to agree with the people saying it's bad because it's a real bad sign if I cant remember a drat thing about a book I read less than two years ago.
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Nov 23, 2019 18:39
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Another random thought: Anander sneers at regular Radchaii for not being worthy enough to even dock with the Radch Dyson sphere or whatever, and apparently the empire is basically a bunch of conquered people adopting customs they dont understand from an immortal psychopath who got bored one day. Maybe they're all calling each other a slur for barbarian instead of an actual genderless noun. Makes you think
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Nov 23, 2019 18:46
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pseudorandom name posted:That "immortal psychopath" is terrified that inscrutable aliens will obliterate humanity and is busy conquering as many people as possible to make sure they obey the terms of the treaty she negotiated on behalf of the species. Never said Anander isnt justified. Still totally a crazy person, though.
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Nov 24, 2019 01:48
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nah, listen to the haters: its decent but is kind of laughable at what the author decided was allowed to have Space Magic and what wasnt. it's one of those books where it's fairly obvious that a centrist liberal wrote it. dont get me wrong, I liked the books, but it's very 'both sides' and the way it portrays poor people is funny. for every realistic part of a poor character there's one that's '80s hollywood criminal'
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Nov 24, 2019 12:31
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I'll cop to being a hot take generator but I generally remember more of a book than 1%. Unfortunstely I can't really choose which books to remember easily so sometimes $2 trash overwrites actual good books
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Nov 25, 2019 04:25
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to be fair, whichever fascist makes a youth corps in real life will undoubtably present themselves as a liberal. but yeah its depressing how much near future sci fi is written by insane boomers. its especially bad in military stuff. like I posted a week back or so about how the third zone war book goes all boomer in the last 100 pages for Reasons. which is setting aside how the author apparently thinks the nepalese and specifically ghurkas are some kind of fascist warrior aristocracy. ajaya's family comes off as... mythologized. maybe that's real and I'm an idiot but who knows
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Nov 26, 2019 19:12
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i read two necromancers, a bureaucrat, and an elf which was good and probably better than that
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Nov 27, 2019 08:35
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Kesper North posted:Did they walk into a bar? unfortunately no
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Nov 27, 2019 09:13
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A Proper Uppercut posted:A while ago I was looking for some, eh, comfortable fantasy? Someone recommended Misenchanted Sword and it was perfect. Are the other books in that series good? It might be too slice of life for you but I really enjoyed Healer's Road. Goblin Emperor wasnt exactly comfortable, but was also very good. I have no idea if those are anything close to Misenchanted Sword cuz I haven't read it yet.
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Nov 30, 2019 15:44
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I'm not sure what I expected when I read the description of Misenchanted Sword, but drat that's a good book. Its like Schwarzenegger from Commando goes home with his daughter and then realizes that, actually, living life with a bunch of war injuries loving sucks and his journey to get a VA claim funded three generations after we disbanded the military
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Dec 1, 2019 16:14
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Although, to be fair, all of that is 100% what I'd expect out of Napleonic French guys who also have magic powers.
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Dec 3, 2019 08:32
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Even though I liked it I think The Thousand Names did essentially the same concept but better.
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Dec 3, 2019 13:54
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Look beggars cant be choosers in the insanely small field of 18th century military fantasy.
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Dec 3, 2019 16:19
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Its because the Aubery-Marturin novels are obviously genre fiction, but well written classic genre fiction. Like how people consider Tolkien and Pratchett to be above criticism. They're insanely popular as sailing novels go, and they're probably the best written example. Ultra detailed but the writing is done in a way that it doesnt matter if the description of sails just passes you over. Hell I was actively trying to ignore the details and still felt like I knew how to be a linesman by the time I read like 6 of them in a row.
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Dec 4, 2019 05:11
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