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a foolish pianist posted:I'm further into Deadhouse Gates, the second Malazan book and jesus christ there's a lot of rape. Every time Erikson needs to illustrate that people are bad, he just goes straight to sexual violence, sometimes even just casually introducing raped women's corpses in remote areas before never mentioning them again. Then there's the bit where men are gutted, then a bunch of women and girls are raped then strangled with the mens' intestines, which I think might also be the cover art to a Cannibal Corpse album. This isn't even mentioning the teenager girl who gets sent to fantasy Dachau to get turned into an overseer's sex slave and addicted to fantasy opium. 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 had very mixed feelings on the series but I still get mad when I think about it. It's the 'hobbling' if you want to google it
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Sep 15, 2020 17:22
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I really liked the Book of the Ancestor series by Mark Lawrence, at least the audiobooks. I had come off a bunch of fairly demanding books and they hit a nice balance between 'grim dark' and 'magic boarding school'. Not perfect by any means but a pretty neat setting and decent characters. The framing story that worked for a couple effective twists in the first book kind of boxed him in on the second and third though. I've been meaning to pick up the one that just came out in the same setting but haven't gotten around to it. Picked up the first Prince of Thorns book on sale and didn't make it past the first chapter, the casual discussion of rape put it well on the wrong side of grim dark.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:20
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Also the reddit poll reminded me of the Michael J Sullivan books, which I stumbled onto the exact same way: looking for trashy fantasy audiobooks from a narrator I enjoyed off Tana French books. The first set is a very light, enjoyable buddy comedy of a set of thieves with hearts of gold that I plowed through quickly, but the prequel series, woof. It started out fairly promisingly, then stalls out for a while, briefly gets interesting again, and ends with one of the biggest disasters I've seen in ages to the point where I'm probably done with the author forever. It even ruined the entire original series by turning it into every single event was ACTUALLY meticulously planned by a mastermind deity.
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Oct 22, 2020 16:26
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I didn't realize until now that the third Poppy War was out but yikes the comments in here make me move the second out of the 'to read' pile. I listened to the first one's audiobook and the turn was extremely unpleasant, especially given that after about thirty seconds I realized 'oh this is the rape of Nanking.... oh, she's going to get into ALL the details' so it was just listening to gruesome misery. It does hit a very annoying combination of being just good enough that I want to see it through but not good enough to compensate for the grimdarkness.
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Jan 19, 2021 21:35
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Ccs posted:I got my hands on a copy of The Necromancer's House, by the author of Between Two Fires. This thing is drat hard to get unless you prefer audiobooks. But it's the best story about modern day wizards I've read since The Magicians, and I've tried a lot of those. In theory I love stories about wizards, yet they make up the majority of the unfinished books on my kindle. I read his book about werewolves ages ago (Those Across the River) and it was a... big swing, for reasons that I couldn't really get into without spoiling, but its very effective and memorable. I've had one of his vampire books sitting around my kindle for ages but since the werewolf one was a downer haven't gotten around to it.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:40
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Benagain posted:Naomi Novik is a good enough writer that I think she kind of trapped herself with the Temeraire series in that it obviously started out as 'what if ships were dragons' and no one including herself expected it to take off. You can see the swerve where she actually starts thinking about some of the issues like 'how are these dragons fed' and 'what effect would it have on world history if air forces existed before industry of any kind.' You can also see from her later works that once she struck it big she stayed away from the long drawn out series and focused on tighter, focused, single volume works because she probably felt burned by that whole experience. I've spent the last year or so working through the entire Temeraire series on audiobook and its helped a LOT by the always magical Simon Vance, but it really could not sustain 9 books, and I think the swerve you point out is part of the reason. FWIW I would slightly disagree with the general consensus that it's a straight downhill line and say that it does perk up a bit for the ending after the long, long Australian expedition. There are a ton of nits to pick because, as you say, it's a thought experiment that kind of doesn't work if you spend too long on it. She was a good enough writer and I'm stubborn enough that I stuck with it but it doesn't hold a candle to Uprooted.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:50
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I wanted to thank you for this recommendation - I jumped in with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and am about halfway through and am enjoying it a lot. For audible don't buy anything outside of credits unless its on sale. The daily deals generally good and they run fairly regular 2 for 1 sales. If the kindle version is on sale you can often get it cheaper by buying that and then doing the 'add audible' to it. Much better though is using Overdrive/Libby through your local library. They have a surprisingly good selection of e-Audiobooks
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Mar 11, 2021 16:33
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pradmer posted:Nevernight by Jay Kristoff - $1.99 I just blew through this series and its trash but mostly enjoyable trash TOTALLY NOT YA (its YA with sex and blood) . Its pretty explicitly 'what if Arya Starks plot was the whole book, and what if she did get to murder every single person on her list, and also vengeance rules'. There's some unbelievably awkward 'man writing lesbian sex scenes' as the main character is bi and I literally guffawed when the main characters female friend refers to the size of her baps. Yes, in this grim dark fantasy world that is a recurring term.
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May 11, 2021 15:56
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darkgray posted:The Red Sister trilogy by Mark Lawrence was wonderfully read by Helen Duff. Huh I actually tried Red Sister blind because I liked Heather O’Neill so much when she read one of Tana Frenchs books. Didn’t realize there was another edition but I’ll vouch for O’Neill any day
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May 2, 2022 00:55
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