Books, Books?, Books!, Books...What are YOU reading? aka the WoT, GoT, Orson Scott Card thread

[mallister]

^this is all good 40k advice.

follow it up with the night lords trilogy by aaron dembski-bowden. the arhiman trilogy by john french is really good to.

please note that there is a huge discrepancy in quality in warhammer literature. some of it is awesome. some of it is...not. a lot of it is just ok and there's a whole lot of what we call 'bolter porn' where its just astartes murdering every thing they see.

[BaneTheBrawler]

If I never see another Harrington book I'll be happy. Shit spiraled downhill.

yeah he failed to pull the trigger on her and turned her into a mary sue, making her seem boring when compared to the offshoot storylines/characters, which give you more than half the story these days.

David Weber is not an example of "not being afraid to kill off characters." I think I know what major character you're thinking of, and Weber has stated explicitly that Honor was supposed to die there. It was supposed to be her Horatio Nelson moment. But he couldn't bring himself to do it and gave it to that character instead. Ever since that moment, she 'grew as a character' by discarding all the flaws that made her interesting and becoming the perfect everything. There are some fun moments, but as I was going through the series a couple years ago, I found myself being bored by the later Honor books, while the spinoffs were still interesting.

[Zetanio]

She was so interesting for a little while and then just turned into this plotarmored borefest.

[Souj]

20% through Revelation Ark and still liking this series a lot.

Picked up the first Witcher book because I plan on playing Witcher 3 and Amazon has kindle deal where you get 30% of purchase toward next book. So I'm between three books right now that I'm deciding to buy.

Broken Angels by Richard K Morgan
Absolution Gap by Alistair Reynolds, the last book of his trilogy
Or get ahead of myself and buy the 2nd Witcher book.

It's hard to decide because I'll end up buying them all anyway. Just depends on which I feel like reading first, which is really hard to determine at the moment lol

[Souj]

20% through Revelation Ark and still liking this series a lot.

70% and its losing me. Stakes are high but seem oddly unimportant. The majority of the book seems like it's just padded with page after page of in-depth explanations, which I'm sure is some people's thing in High Sci-Fi kind of stuff, but it either wasn't as bad in the first book or I overlooked it, or the subject matter was just far more interesting to me than the stuff in this book. I'm feeling like this book is just going to end with me shrugging.

[BaneTheBrawler]

I found the first couple books vaguely offputting, but the later ones got better. still didn't tickle my fancy, but didn't leave me unsatisfied.

[Zetanio]

70% and its losing me. Stakes are high but seem oddly unimportant. The majority of the book seems like it's just padded with page after page of in-depth explanations, which I'm sure is some people's thing in High Sci-Fi kind of stuff, but it either wasn't as bad in the first book or I overlooked it, or the subject matter was just far more interesting to me than the stuff in this book. I'm feeling like this book is just going to end with me shrugging.

Yeah, I fucking feel you on this.

[Zetanio]

I read Good Omens by Gaiman and Pratchett.

It was... decent. I guess I really still don't like Pratchett's style that much. It's a fun story in part but also a bit too sideways in others.

[Andalusian girls]

never got the Pratchett love either, thought Good Omens was solidly mediocre and considerably worse than Gaiman's solo stuff.

been on a Southern Gothic kick of late, read The Road because i haven't cried in public for a while, then As I Lay Dying because i haven't cried in public while looking like an intellectual in a while. think something by O'Connor may be next so i can look woke while crying in public.

[Andalusian girls]

southern gothic more like southern tragic am i right fellas. these boys sure had a lot of issues with their dead parents

[Zetanio]

never got the Pratchett love either, thought Good Omens was solidly mediocre and considerably worse than Gaiman's solo stuff.

been on a Southern Gothic kick of late, read The Road because i haven't cried in public for a while, then As I Lay Dying because i haven't cried in public while looking like an intellectual in a while. think something by O'Connor may be next so i can look woke while crying in public.

Yeah, you could tell Gaiman had far less influence on the final product and that he was also very early in his career.

[Souj]

Finished Redemption Ark and man, I loved that first book but i think this one completely turned me off from even bothering to read the third. Nearly all this book came to absolutely nothing and I felt like he came up with the title of the book first and then the big idea stringing all the characters together was "har har, I'm going to give every character a redemption arc! *wink wink. But then he forgot so he just shoe horned that part all in in the last forty pages.

Spoiler: show

Ilya could have actually died at ththe end of book 1 and not be miraculously saved at the end. The inhibitors could have attacked immediately after activating Hades and they could have used up half the weapons to defeat them (with the threat of more coming left in the air.) Sylveste still gets put in Hades and Yellowstone becomes where all the refugees come from instead of Regusam(sp). And then I think they had the same "maybe they're telling us the truth, or maybe they're lying. Maybe they're telling us to try and mislead us, knowing we know they know we know they're lying" conversation at least three different times.

[Zetanio]

Preach man.

[BaneTheBrawler]

yeah. they're weird books, and frankly i was surprised to learn how popular they'd become. i love me some sci-fi but those just didn't tickle my fancy.

[Zealot]

Just finished reading Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. It's an exhaustive but engaging look at Afghanistan from 1979 to September 10, 2001. Informative and infuriating.

[Andalusian girls]

no spoilers but how did we do

[Zetanio]

not great

[Zealot]

Actually if we hadn't kept making the same series of terrible mistakes over and over again for 20+ years through multiple administrations and CIA directors despite the results always being the same and overwhelming evidence that we were inviting a terrorist strike on American soil, we would've been ok.

[Zealot]

But at least it got us to invent drone strikes.

[Zetanio]

I mean we were like, super close.