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On October 22 2013 13:39 Nouar wrote:
(If only Pratchett could have like 10 new books on the shelves like right *now*, I'd die of bliss.)
Thanks for the further suggestions, I'll look up all those.
And people, you've gotta try The Death Gate cycle by Weis&Hickman. It's... unusually interesting. Main character is supposedly a bad guy, but they are all shady anyways. There's a lot of good ideas on how people could evolve in different worlds, too.
I re-read it this summer after having read it as a teenager, it felt good but waaaay too short regarding the potential character development that coul have been possible.
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Countering all the hip and fantasy stuff with Gore Vidal. Was wondering about the US military complex 50 years ago, kind of boring, American culture has been regurgitated quite enough I feel. Need some Asian writers like Vidal... Would be interesting to read about China from such a perspective. Too bad back then such writers had an above average chance of winding up dead, leave alone their publications.
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Currently I am reading this:
![[image loading]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41fU53ZihdL.jpg)
Stellar writing, great picks of historical figures - and an Austrian as well 
I am reading it in the german language of course, but since this forum is international I used the english cover in the pic.
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i enjoyed the southpole story in particular
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On October 21 2013 14:22 Nouar wrote:Show nested quote +On October 21 2013 05:52 Nyxisto wrote:On October 21 2013 05:31 Nouar wrote:
Finished A Dance With Dragons. (spoiler : George RR Martin : FUCK YOU. Sincerely.)
Problem : I'm 2 weeks into a 4months business trip, and from december to february I will have NOTHING to do except read (and work), being in a refugee camp, and I'm already out of books. T_T
Any good fantasy series, not black and white (Eddings I despise you), more like the Death Gate cycle (or GoT) ?
Is the Wheel of Time worth it ? (Yeah i'll have THAT much time) I read the majority of the Wheel of Time series a long time ago. I think the series is quite okay as long as you don't expect an intellectual challenge, as the series is quite 'light' and not as complex as ASOIAF. The First Law trilogy is really good, as long as you don't have a problem of reading point of view characters that you can't really sympathize with. But if you're a fan of darker fantasy written in a nice self-ironic/cynical style you're probably gonna like the series a lot. The Jim Butcher novels are also fast-paced and a lot of fun, but of course in a different category than GRRM and Abercrombie. On October 21 2013 05:22 sam!zdat wrote:
that project implodes itself. which is why the break from the early to late ludwig (if you are of the camp that such a break exists). I'm not really in a camp yet :D just read it for the first time and I'll probably need to read it a few times more. If you start to get what he's really talking about the book offers quite a lot i think , but i don't like that it's basically written like a calculus-script as he is kind of inventing his own school of thought just on the fly, which makes it really hard to grasp. Thanks, I'll have a look at Abercrombie first, then. Ok, no Wheel of Time for me, I want my brain to have to work. Show nested quote +On October 21 2013 06:36 packrat386 wrote:
Didn't read past the word fantasy. Go read everything that tolkein ever wrote. Thank you for the other answers, but of course I've read all Tolkien (as well as Lovecraft), and while I thoroughly enjoy quality writing, I tend to like less and less "good vs evil" as time goes. Show nested quote +On October 21 2013 06:50 babylon wrote:
And everything by Guy Gavriel Kay.
Robin Hobb is good too (her Fitz series + Liveship series).
& if you're into urban fantasy, try some Steven Brust. I tried the Royal Assassin (6books) like 10 years ago by Robin Hobb, wasn't impressed.
Stuff by Brandon Sanderson. Mistborn Trilogy + Standalone "fourth" book (Alloy of Law), Steelheart, Warbreaker, if you don't mind starting a 10 novel series that is yet to be released past the first novel you could check out Way of Kings (Stormlight Archives series). Probably one of the best fantasy I've read (after Mistborn :3).
EDIT: I recently finished Colour of Magic:
![[image loading]](http://www.peregrine.asso.fr/IMG/jpg/the-colour-of-magic.jpg)
I didn't find it that good actually. It was more a book I kept reading just to finish it to be able to start reading the next book...
I don't know what it was really... It was kind of slow, not so interesting, the jokes were okay sometimes, but most of the was pretty lame actually.
I've heard that some of his later books are worth a read, what do you guys think?
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On October 22 2013 20:34 TOCHMY wrote:Show nested quote +On October 21 2013 14:22 Nouar wrote:On October 21 2013 05:52 Nyxisto wrote:On October 21 2013 05:31 Nouar wrote:
Finished A Dance With Dragons. (spoiler : George RR Martin : FUCK YOU. Sincerely.)
Problem : I'm 2 weeks into a 4months business trip, and from december to february I will have NOTHING to do except read (and work), being in a refugee camp, and I'm already out of books. T_T
Any good fantasy series, not black and white (Eddings I despise you), more like the Death Gate cycle (or GoT) ?
Is the Wheel of Time worth it ? (Yeah i'll have THAT much time) I read the majority of the Wheel of Time series a long time ago. I think the series is quite okay as long as you don't expect an intellectual challenge, as the series is quite 'light' and not as complex as ASOIAF. The First Law trilogy is really good, as long as you don't have a problem of reading point of view characters that you can't really sympathize with. But if you're a fan of darker fantasy written in a nice self-ironic/cynical style you're probably gonna like the series a lot. The Jim Butcher novels are also fast-paced and a lot of fun, but of course in a different category than GRRM and Abercrombie. On October 21 2013 05:22 sam!zdat wrote:
that project implodes itself. which is why the break from the early to late ludwig (if you are of the camp that such a break exists). I'm not really in a camp yet :D just read it for the first time and I'll probably need to read it a few times more. If you start to get what he's really talking about the book offers quite a lot i think , but i don't like that it's basically written like a calculus-script as he is kind of inventing his own school of thought just on the fly, which makes it really hard to grasp. Thanks, I'll have a look at Abercrombie first, then. Ok, no Wheel of Time for me, I want my brain to have to work. On October 21 2013 06:36 packrat386 wrote:
Didn't read past the word fantasy. Go read everything that tolkein ever wrote. Thank you for the other answers, but of course I've read all Tolkien (as well as Lovecraft), and while I thoroughly enjoy quality writing, I tend to like less and less "good vs evil" as time goes. On October 21 2013 06:50 babylon wrote:
And everything by Guy Gavriel Kay.
Robin Hobb is good too (her Fitz series + Liveship series).
& if you're into urban fantasy, try some Steven Brust. I tried the Royal Assassin (6books) like 10 years ago by Robin Hobb, wasn't impressed. Stuff by Brandon Sanderson. Mistborn Trilogy + Standalone "fourth" book (Alloy of Law), Steelheart, Warbreaker, if you don't mind starting a 10 novel series that is yet to be released past the first novel you could check out Way of Kings (Stormlight Archives series). Probably one of the best fantasy I've read (after Mistborn :3). EDIT: I recently finished Colour of Magic: I didn't find it that good actually. It was more a book I kept reading just to finish it to be able to start reading the next book... I don't know what it was really... It was kind of slow, not so interesting, the jokes were okay sometimes, but most of the was pretty lame actually. I've heard that some of his later books are worth a read, what do you guys think?
The Truth, Night Watch, basically all Watch books, Going Postal and it's little brother Making Money, Hogfather (my favourite)... depending on what kind of story you want, there's bound to be some that will appeal to you, whether the witches, watch, rincewind, Death and his family.. the fucking WIZARDS. (they are soooo golden later on !). I re-read the first two recently, and they got old, I'll admit.
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I've heard that the one when Death takes a vacation is hilarious.
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On October 22 2013 23:05 TOCHMY wrote:
I've heard that the one when Death takes a vacation is hilarious.
yeah it's called mort, third of fourth book i think, I only read a few but that one is definitely the best so far.
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I find that Pyramids, Small Gods, Guards Guards, Feet of Clay to be the best books Pratchett ever wrote.
Edit:
The film HogFather was awesome as well. The book itself is very good, but there's something special about this film. Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) made me appreciate Susan Sto Helit more than when I read the books.
![[image loading]](http://img003.lazygirls.info/people/michelle_dockery/michelle_dockery_as_susan_sto_helit_in_hogfather_2_j8OtRZVo.sized.png)
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On October 22 2013 19:36 Doublemint wrote:Currently I am reading this: Stellar writing, great picks of historical figures - and an Austrian as well I am reading it in the german language of course, but since this forum is international I used the english cover in the pic.
Stefan Zweig makes one yearn for an age when the Historian's craft had not yet become bureaucratised by Academia. The fact that modern German historians are dull and pedantic does not owe itself to the limitations of their language, but to grave shortcomings in the pedagogic doctrine of the German-speaking countries.
If you like Stefan Zweig and history, you might enjoy the biographical sketches of his purpled contemporary, Emil Ludwig!
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Just finished "A Feast for Crows".
I'd expected it to be dull and slow from reviews I'd read beforehand, but it was a nice easy read. Looking forward to read a Dance with Dragons later this year. I got the book in the shelf already, but I want to savour the story a bit first.
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/8puVoMn.jpg)
Blood: A Southern Fantasy
Michael Moorcock
I’ve been reading books by Michael Moorcock on and off for most of my life, I started off with the pulpy (but no less insane) fantasy fiction from the Eternal Champion and Stormbringer series when I was a kid, but most recently have moved on to his later work – the last I read was Mother London, as far as I could tell, a semi-autobiographical novel based in the Great City flitting back and forth from WWII to 1980s, one of the characters had a psychic connection to unexploded bombs.
Blood is a loose collection of connected stories, one strand of which focuses on the tale of an alternate reality set in the Southern States where industrial drilling to has caused a fault in the Earth’s crust (or rather its metaphysical being) that is slowly consuming the world and which also acts a gateway to other dimensions as well as disrupting the very nature of reality. The world has devolved into a quasi-steampunk society in which black and white race-relations have (partially) been reversed, the heroes of this society are the ‘jugadors’ or gamblers that are able to manipulate or flirt with the chaotic influence of the fault on reality. The other strand of stories are a series of tongue-in-cheek space operas in which spaceships and their charismatic captains are locked in an epic battle between the forces of chaos and the forces of singularity, the captains have ridiculous names like Billy-Bob and the spaceships are called things like I Don’t Want to Go to Chelsea and The Whole Hog. These goings-on are set in the Second Ether (a plane of existence beyond our own) where the laws of our reality also no longer apply.
The Southern States stories, of which the majority of the novel consists, are written in a kind of magical-realist style but without the tone of sobriety – the narrative meanders in places and departs on tangents in parenthesis (it is never quite clear how or by whom the novel is being told); however rather than hindering it this style embodies the fantasy world Moorcock depicts: an unstable, uncertain world ruled by luck. This makes the plot hard to follow or get to grips with, especially at the beginning, but I find it really rewarding when I do, quite a challenging text and very similar in style to Mother London. You really feel like you are drifting along floating on a patch of chaotic un-reality. It also makes occasional metafictional appeals to the reader (indeed the novel presents itself as a collection of manuscripts that Moorcock himself has simply been given) which also compliment the trans-dimensional shifts in the fantasy world. In the space opera parts the style is radically different and far more conventional and straight forward in how the story is told, however the names of the characters, their interacts, histories etc proliferate into absurdity – again matching Moorcock’s fractal-like image of reality.
This novel really marks a stark departure in tone from his earlier, more conventional work. I wonder has anyone that is familiar with Moorcock’s fantasy ever read any of his later novels, how do you think they compare? They definitely up the ante in how they work with the themes of chaos and law that Moorcock has dealt with through much of his oeuvre. The craziness and complexity of the way he writes I find really compelling – its quality really embodies the world in which his characters inhabit.
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that stark departure is what we call the new wave. Moorcock being the self appointed prophet of same. I'm taking a seminar about this currently, talk a lot about moorcock.
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Interesting, I'll have to check out that London book, as it seems to relate rather nicely to one of the major plot threads in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Throughout a lot of the early portion of the book, Pynchon extensively describes a fictional Allied counter-intelligence program that revolves around using unorthodox strategies in fighting the Germans, one of the chief ones being about how to determine where German bombs are going to hit during the Blitz. It gets hilariously ridiculous as they go from describing how the Pavlovians have arrived with the supposed end of the war in hand while a "telekinetic" stares at house plants in an attempt to get them to move. Anyways, one of the major contenders as a viable solution to the bomb detecting problem turns out to be this promiscuous dude who works for a minor British government office, as it would seem that the locations of his affairs with women are dead on predictors of where bombs are going to fall. It only gets better from there, but I couldn't but help but add that in after seeing talk of psychic connections with unexploded bombs 
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sounds like Time Out of Joint
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On October 25 2013 09:17 sam!zdat wrote:
sounds like Time Out of Joint
That's what I was thinking. Have you read much PKD?
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On October 25 2013 10:37 Myrddraal wrote:That's what I was thinking. Have you read much PKD?
yes, i suppose i have
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I've read a decent amount of his books, I was reading In Milton Lumkey Territory just recently but it wasn't really grabbing me. Have you read it by any chance? If so, does it get any more interesting?
Like all his books it's short so I should just get through it, but at the moment I just don't care about what is happening and all the characters just kind of annoy me.
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I liked MLT a lot better than I expected to but I would not recommend reading his non-SF work (EXCEPT the transmigration of timothy archer) unless you are really a PKD fan and want to understand another side of him. Someday I am going to use MLT to good effect in a paper but it's not really something I would recommend to others.
some of my favorite dick novels:
dr bloodmoney
do androids..?
three stigmata of palmer eldritch
ubik
flow my tears the policeman said
valis
the transmigration of timothy archer
man in the high castle
scanner darkly
edit: keep in mind that MLT was not published in his lifetime. if he weren't PKD it would never have been published. it's a minor work by a major writer. which is always worth something, but if you don't like it, stop reading it. unless you fancy yourself a PKD scholar, in which case you'd better read it and take notes 
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EPT![[image loading]](https://www.scmp.com/sites/default/files/2013/08/16/276ead4875c365071ce973438e160a82.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.sfsite.com/gra/0803/malg.jpg)
