Not to be confused with this post, in which various alternatives to abstinence are explored in far too much detail.
I’ve had a bit more time to read, lately, now that the computer is whole again, and the receiver is sent off to the shop for rescusitation, and that there’s enough room in the garage for the wife’s car. Going back as far as vacation, I’ve read:
Atlas Shrugged: Although I still resonate with some of the values in this book, I haven’t ever really found it to be representative of anything resembling real life, in my experience. I’ve always found Ms. Rand’s notion of sex, for instance, to be quite different from anything that seems natural to me. Plus, I’ve never really had that killer urge to bring my competition to its knees, or to take the wife by force. Still, her ideas as regards excellence are worthy of attention. For those of you who pinged me because I said I don’t know what Objectivism is, there’s a couple of sides to that: I do know what Rand says Objectivism is, and up to a point I think it’s got value. The extrapolation from first principles to implementation (as postulated in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead), though, isn’t anything resembling a straight line. So to me, there’s a gap between first principles and principles Rand derives from first principles, and I don’t understand how that derivation works. Another thing: I’ve read this book several times over the last three decades or so, and it seems I’m just now noticing the plague of punctuation errors in it. I’m wondering, for the Gary Farbers out there, if this is simply poor editing or if usage has changed that much since its publication.
Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson. Damn, for a book that he wrote seventeen years ago, this kicks ass. It lacks the arid wit of his later offerings, and it also lacks a great deal of the humorous parenthetical commentary, but if you’ve already read Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age and The Baroque Cycle and Snow Crash, then this is well worth your time. And at just over three hundred pages, it’s low risk, timewise. The plot is basically related to toxic-waste dumping in Boston Harbor, with emphasis on dioxins and related compounds. Good technical background on the aforementioned toxic waste; could be completely wrong but it at least it’s plausible.
In the Beginning…was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson. This is nonfiction, and is an essay of sorts on computers, with emphasis on Mac vs PC. Stephenson doesn’t favor one over the other so much as note that both Apple and Microsoft successfully market to people’s desire to have made the Right Choice; they’re both selling image, not substance. He spends some time on UNIX and Linux in comparison, but I’m not sure he’s really wrapped the whole issue up as well as he could. Linux still has some software gaps that it needs to fill in order to dominate the world (as it should), and Stephenson failed (IMO) to consider this as a serious shortcoming. Still, for a book that’s now six years old, very insightful.
Vitals, by Greg Bear. Bear writes what I consider to be "hard" science fiction; Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children are primarily books about how evolutional jumps may occur; this book begins being about turning off the ageing "feature", and takes an abrupt turn into influencing the population by introducing carefully engineered (in a low-tech sense) bacteria into their bodies. It’s fiction, but it scared the hell out of me in much the same way as The Hot Zone did. In this book, Bear’s main character is a rather unlikeable fellow who you wind up siding with because of the problems he’s beset with. The ending is deliberately (I think) ambiguous, which could be thought-provoking or a setup for a sequel. Either way, a good read.
Memoir from Antproof Case, by Mark Helprin. So far, the best book I’ve read this decade. I hated this book, starting out. The protagonist is not someone you’d have any emotional connection to at all: eighty years old, living in Brazil and a fugitive from…something. And in more than one respect, a raving lunatic: he cannot abide the smell of coffee, and at times takes rather excessive measures to keep even the smell of it away from him. He is, by all appearances, someone that few readers could care about. By about a third of the way through, I was thoroughly hooked, and by the end I was enchanted. Helprin has, in this book, demonstrated a talent for connecting the reader to beauty and emotion, rather than simply doing a workmanlike job of describing it. And of course by the end, the protagonist winds up looking like someone you’d want to have known. I recommend this book to everyone. I recall being similarly enchanted by A Winter’s Tale when it came out a couple of decades ago; now I’m going to have to go back and read it again. And I’m going to have to clear out a section for Helprin on my bookshelf, permanently.
in the night room by Peter Straub. Straub has written a number of books whose protagonist is Timothy Underhill; this is the latest. This is another variation on the theme of laying ghosts to rest, and Straub’s made a fairly lengthy and successful career from that theme. Good read. Not his best effort, but not everything can be. My favorite book by Straub is Mystery, which is very good indeed.
The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams. Interesting, but not nearly his best effort. For that, look to the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy beginning with The Dragonbone Chair.
I’ve also seen a few movies: Primer, The Machinist, and The Jacket.
Primer lost me, and I’m going to have to see it again. There’s a great deal of conversation that got lost at normal volume levels that were absolutely key to understanding what the hell was going on. This is a very interesting movie even disregarding plot, though: the budget was reportedly $7000. If you can imagine a group of guys building a time machine in a home garage, the result is plausibly much more like this than the multi-million-dollar special effects Hollywood seems to gravitate toward. There’s some unresolved paradoxes/overlaps here that I probably didn’t get because they were explained in a conversation I missed. This film relies more on character interactions for story background than on imagery; the cinematography is absolutely spartan (not to be confused with low quality, though).
The Machinist was hands-down the most captivating of this trio. I’ve got to ‘fess up, though, that Christian Bale was at least as gripping as the plot and characters: Bale lost what’s got to be 60 or 80 lbs for this role, and the question of what’s eating this guy, literally, that he’s lost this much weight is distracting to the point that you almost cannot pay attention to the clues provided along the way. Bale is anguish embodied, without actually expressing it overtly. Hackneyed phrases like "gut-wrenching" spring to mind, not because of graphic visual imagery, but because of the stark emotional impact. If you haven’t already seen this, go see it. Very good supporting performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, but Bale’s the show here.
The Jacket was a wonderful movie for exactly as long as you can accept that time travel is possible via drugs. It goes without saying, then, that there’s a major problem with the storyline. Performances from Adrien Brody and the always wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh take this from thumbs-down to a recommend, if you don’t have more pressing things to do. I enjoyed it during; it’s the thinking-about-it-afterward part that downgraded it.
Music-wise, I’ve been listening to 12 Girls Band, which is a group of Chinese women that do a mix of Asian and Western classical and popular music, arranged for Chinese instruments. Very interesting and also quite pleasant. Their arrangement of Coldplay’s Clocks led me to decide to buy that disk, only to discover that it’d been sitting on my shelf, long ago purchased but still wrapped. So I’ve been listening to A Rush of Blood to the Head quite a bit, and liking it a lot.
Of course, this is an open thread. I’d appreciate the opinions of others on the above selections, as well as recommendations for further reading, viewing and listening.
I know, there are various errors in usage, etc, that I’ll fix just as soon as Typepad lets me back in.
A fun SF novel I read this last year was Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, which speculates about political conflicts in an almost totally decentralized America in 2044. Slightly techno-utopian, some slight clunkiness in style, but very smart, nonetheless.
I liked Zodiac too. For a Stephenson novel, it’s unusually straightforward!
Zodiac kicks butt. Great book, make me want to throw off this whole programming thing and become a crusader hunting down sources of toxins. Or at least wander about hardware stores buying odd things to block up waste lines.
i recommend Jeff VanDerMeer’s collection City of Saints and Madmen – in fact, i recommend it every chance i get.
for music, i recommend Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs. it’s hard to pin this down, but i can hear things that remind me of Beck’s Sea Change, Elliot Smith, John Mayer (yuck, but it’s not overpowering), etc.. smart, witty, introspective, etc..
for food, i recommend this chicken satay recipe. i made it last weekend and it was awesome.
My favorite part of the book, by the way, was how they plugged a sewer line at the point a business was dumping into it. The bagged concrete, reinforced by rods of rebar jammed through in various directions, supplanted by various other stuff, and protected from above by sanding the edges of the manhole cover and seat and epoxying the cover in place, topped off with a layer of concrete that hid the very presence of the manhole.
Stephenson’s got a diabolical side, no question.
Command line – My favorite part of that essay was the metaphor of the intersection with the car dealerships on each corner. On one corner, Microsoft, selling basically functional, clunky, but cheap station wagons; on another, the sleek, elegant, expensive Apples rolling silently out of the beautifully landscaped dealership, their hoods welded shut, and across the street, in a vacant lot, a bunch of bearded hippies under a Linux flag jumping up and down and waving, trying (and largely failing) to give away free tanks that go a hundred miles an hour and run on water.
As to coldplay, I really liked both Parachutes and Rush of Blood to the head; Coldplay definitely flirted with mass-market pop, but they retained their own identity, and were a cut above a lot of the major-label stuff (“The Scientist,” for example, is a classic song, as is “Don’t Panic” from Parachutes). I say were, because I beg you to save yourself the disappointment and do NOT bother with X&Y. The whole album is so obviously overproduced, sweetened, and dumbed down as to be unlistenable. It is as if a huge synthesizer took a s**t all over the record. I have nothing against synths per se, but too often they are used in pop music solely to make weak songs sound fuller. That’s the story on X&Y – the arrangements and melodies don’t sound finished, Martin’s vocals sound tentative, and every song has that glisteny synth wash in the background; I’m not kidding – every single song. Disappointing.
The actor Alec Guinness hated his role as Obi Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars”, though he loved the 2 1/2% profit cut he received. He couldn’t stand using that mellifluous instrument of a voice for the crappy dialogue. Later in his life, in public somewhere, a mother ushered her young son up to him for an autograph, exclaiming to Guinness, “He’s seen Star Wars 100 times!”
Guinness dutifully signed his name, leaned over the child, and intoned “Promise me you’ll never watch it again.”
Which is my command and wish for you, Slart, regarding “Atlas Shrugged”. You must stop now and read something else. Or I will drop my tools and abandon the excellent skyscraper I’m building through sheer force of will in the back yard and take my wife by force when she gets home in the evening and get melodrama all over her. What page is that on? 😉
That is all. Thank you.
A movie I could watch, however.
“Atlas Shrugged”, the musical.
I loved Zodiac – incredibly gripping novel. Have you read any of Stephen Gould’s books? (Blind Waves, Helm, Jumper) Not really hard science fiction (and a bit less, um, tough, in tone), but similarly gripping. Darwin’s Radio didn’t really grab me when I read it, so I never got around to the sequel, but I just finished Evolution’s Shore (apparently also published as Chaga) by Ian McDonald, which I really enjoyed. It’s a much less plausible portrayal of evolution, I think, but to my mind was a more fun read.
When I saw Primer, the theatre was offering a free second viewing if you came back with the ticket stub of your first viewing (sadly, my stub fell out of my pocket somewhere along the way home). You really do need to see it twice – but if you google, there have been a few attempts to sort out the various recursions and paradoxes in the plot. Definitely a neat movie, at any rate.
John, you’re a sick, twisted individual. You are hanging on by a very thin thread and I dig that about you!
I haven’t ever really found it to be representative of anything resembling real life, in my experience
My, that’s the understatement of the week. To be honest, I have enjoyed some of Rand’s shorter essays. I think she is wrong where she’s not platitudinous, and platitudinous where she isn’t wrong, but sometimes the rhetoric is bracing, like a marching band. But the novels–oh, Lord–life’s just too short. I do love the Gary Cooper movie, though.
On a trip recently, I read Brian Lumley’s Hero of Dreams, which is delightfully awful–think Lovecraft-meets-Howard-meets-Leiber-meets-Tolkien–and one of Lauren Henderson’s Sam Jones mysteries, Black Rubber Dress, which is entertaining enough for the road. Before that, I read Jonathan Ames’ The Extra Man, a novel about a compulsive lingerie fetishist/crossdresser and his roommate, an ancient gigolo/adjunct English professor. It’s funny, very much like A Confederacy of Dunces, but not nearly as good as that book. Before that it was Fitzgerald’s Iliad. Right now I’m reading Martin West’s translations of Greek lyric poetry and Fitzgerald’s Odyssey. I don’t know why I’m on such a classics binge lately, but Ancient Greece/Late Antiquity is a period I can return to again and again. At bedtime I’m reading Lord Dunsany’s Pegana books
Currently, I’m listening to Luomo’s Present Lover–nice microhousy stuff–Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, some old Afrika Bambaata, Looking for the perfect beat, Favela Booty Beats, and the Verve Ella Fitzgerald/Louis Armstrong (which I haven’t cracked open yet). I liked Clocks the few times I heard it on MTV, but never felt impelled to seek out more. The fact that Chris Martin sounds more insufferable than Bono and screechier than Thom Yorke may have something to do with that. Am I missing something?
To be honest, I couldn’t make it through much Rand. Couldn’t make it through The Baroque Cycle either, but for entirely different reasons; this was highly disappointing given my love of Stephenson’s other books. I wanted to like the Cycle.
I have been on a binge of lowbrow entertainment ever since I moved. Most of my tools and modeling stuff is still packed, and will remain so until my workbench gets delivered today, so I’ve been spending a lot more time on the computer than I generally like. This has manifested itself in a brief indulgence of complete and utter insanity in which I decided I was going to get into MMORPGs, something I promised myself I would never, ever do. Being a 15-year player of the Elite games, I tried Jumpgate, and was disappointed. I tried Guild Wars, which was great hack-and-slash fun for a short time but devoid of long-term appeal. About that time I came to my senses and realized that if I actually found an MMORPG that I did like enough to keep playing it, I’d regret it and lose all semblance of free time.
Thus am I back to books, and biding my time waiting to have a workspace again. I’m a few hundred pages into the latest Harry Potter book, and not finding myself in any great hurry to finish it. Considering that Jess and I originally met on a Harry Potter MUSH, this should probably bother me more than it does.
…I think that’s enough stream-of-consciousness rambling for one morning. Caffeine. Now.
I’ll drink to that. Really, I could wake up a bit. Does this make both of us “caffeine-seeky”?
_Darwin’s Radio_ sucks.
_the curious incident of the dog in the night-time_ is very good.
I thought _The Diamond Age_ had an ok beginning and a few good scenes/ideas but was otherwise mostly mush.
Reading the great John Crowley’s novel _The Translator_. It’s not a basis-for-a-new-religion book like some of his earlier work, but 20% in it’s very good.
About that far into BtVS season two with the wife.
About that far into BtVS season two with the wife.
The best is yet to come. Buffy gets very good in second season, third season is surpassingly excellent, and four season still pretty good. After that it goes downhill, which about corresponds with the time that Joss Whedon went off to work on The Great Work that is Firefly.
I’ll drink to that. Really, I could wake up a bit. Does this make both of us “caffeine-seeky”?
Every day of every week of every month of every year.
And I actually had managed to kick caffeine there, for a while. Before this job.
Two interesting and obviously quite different books I’ve read recently:
“Death in Rome” by Wolfgang Koeppen
“Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World,” by Jack Weatherford
Has anyone read the Koeppen in German?
Weatherford seems to be a great admirer of Genghis Khan, for reasons I don’t grasp. While surely a great general, he does not seem to have had much purpose other than conquest and looting.
I really like Neil Stephenson’s writing for the most part, but I would love to see his editor (metaphorically) flog him every time he decides to go on another 12 page data Wiki. Stop with the infodumps already. This, by the way, is also my only criticism of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Stop it before you catch a Rowling sized case of novel bloat.
My highest recommendation for current techno-science fiction is any one of Richard Morgan’s recent novels: Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Market Forces (which I have not yet read, so let that temper my recommendation). The two I have read can best be described as violent cyber-noir with a strong, first-person narrative voice. Morgan himself is very cool in person (he says, having recently attended the SF panel at Comicon which featured him, Orson Scott Card, and Vernor Vinge among others). I also enjoyed Jennifer Government by Max Barry, but with the caveat that Barry’s writing style is heavy on surface and style, and lighter on character depth.
Re: command line and OS choice. I’ve recently had a good friend abandon Linux for Mac land and OS X, with its Unix base. I’ve heard some rumblings–both on-line and in Wired–that this might be happening on a larger scale. Anyone know how much signal is in this noise?
“Foucault’s Pendulum”. I loved that book. But I don’t reccomend it for paranoid people.
I was not a big fan of Darwin’s Radio but I loved Bear’s “Queen of Angels”. The idea of actually going into the mind of a psychopath has never been done better.
Is Vernor Vinge writing anything? It seems like it has been forever? One of my favorite fun sci-fi authors is Daniel Keyes Morans. His “The Long Run” was great, and I really enjoyed “The Last Dancer”. I understand he has had some trouble getting his work published–perhaps difficulties working with an editor. Unfortunate.
One of my favorite fun sci-fi authors is Daniel Keyes Morans.
Sebastian, you are my new hero.
Seriously. Daniel Keys Moran has been one of my all-time favorite Sci-Fi author for about 15 years going now. Actually corresponded with him once–great guy. I cannot recommend The Long Run or The Last Dancer highly enough, although you really should read Emerald Eyes first. Just keep in mind that they are fun–dark at times, to be sure, but not to be taken wholly seriously. The Long Run, in particular, is a romp with some of the best lines ever.
I’m a little out of the loop on the CTML, but as I understand it, Dan had to fight his previous publisher tooth and nail to get the rights to his books back, and since then has been working on getting them republished through small houses, with some success. You can find trade paperbacks of the Castanaveras trilogy at the UW bookstore, but I couldn’t even begin to tell you where else. They’re also being published in Russian.
Nobody hears much from him anymore, but I understand he’s been diverting a lot of time to raising his family–and I can’t say I blame him.
Never hoid a the guy. SciFi has as much if not more crap as any other genre, so I tend to find someone I like and consume their entire body of work. I’ll have to check him out.
Vinge’s most recent is Marooned in Realtime, published Oct. 2004. He recently retired from San Diego State College.
Never hoid a the guy. SciFi has as much if not more crap as any other genre, so I tend to find someone I like and consume their entire body of work. I’ll have to check him out.
He can be extremely difficult to find, as nearly all of his stuff is OOP and didn’t have extremely large print runs to begin with. Amazon sometimes has stock.
Start
Is Vernor Vinge writing anything? It seems like it has been forever?
You’ve almost certainly got this already, but A Deepness in the Sky is recent by Vinge’s standards, within the last five years or so.
Marooned in Realtime is old — from the 80’s, I think. That must be just a new edition.
Or here, for the actual link.
Speaking of Vinges, I’m a big fan of Joan Vinge’s Psion and Catspaw.
Trivia: that’s actually where “Catsy” comes from. I happened to be reading Catspaw one day when I needed a new handle to logon to a BBS where my usual handle was taken. I chose “Catspaw”, and ended up hanging out a lot with the people there IRL. Since there were a few of us there with my real name, we got referred to by our handles, and Catspaw later got nicked to Catsy. That was about twelve years ago, and it stuck.
I really really liked Morgan’s books too. Fast, original and exciting.
On the less techno-oriented speculative fiction: I recently bumped into Jim Butcher’s books and he definately spoiled me for Harry Potter 6. I read the latter, but it does not have the pace, idea’s, dialogue, funny bits that Butchers Dresden files have.
spoiled as in “I liked them less”, not as in “he had a similar plot”
spoiled as in “I liked HP less after reading his books”, not as in “he had a similar plot”
LizardBreath– So it is. Marooned… first printed 1986. That’ll school me.
One of Vinge’s comments at Comicon (or another panelist responding to Vinge) was that the notion of the ‘Singularity’ makes it really tough to write anything SF that is not far-future for fear of getting the science either laughably wrong or trivially right within a decade or two.
Vernor Vinge’s _Marooned in Realtime_ is a brilliant idea-driven book, a sterling example of what SF can do within its usual self-imposed limits. _A Fire Upon the Deep_ is easily one of the smartest and best space operas. _A Deepness in the Sky_, the prequel to _AFUTD_, has a very clever structure and one or two great ideas and is a fine read, but the characterization demands of the plot are a bit too much for Vinge.
ObSFFRec: John Ford – _Growing Up Weightless_ or _The Last Hot Time_ – for those who like great writing without any handholding from the author.
Have been reading George R. R. Martin’s epic series slowly. It’s great but emotionally difficult – sometimes it feels like abuse.
Have been reading George R. R. Martin’s epic series slowly. It’s great but emotionally difficult – sometimes it feels like abuse.
I know the feeling. I love the Song of Ice and Fire series, and think it’s quite possibly some of the best fantasy I’ve ever read, but the world is brutal.
That said, I can’t wait for the next one.
“I read the latter, but it does not have the pace, idea’s, dialogue, funny bits that Butchers Dresden files have.”
Hehe. I do love the part (3rd book? 4th?)about the Russian who has been chosen by God to fight evil demons and is also atheist. The banter goes something like: “Atheist? But you were personally selected by the archangel Michael and given that magical sword!”
“So? What makes more sense? The idea that I talked to an angel or the idea that I am seriously hallucinating?”
A third for George R.R. Martin, great stuff, will the next one ever be finished? Also loved the Tad Williams series, but his best work by far are the Otherland books, they are amazing. Lastly, if you enjoy the fantasy stuff, I’ve been reading Gardens of the Moon series by Steven Erikson, absolutely riveting.
Yeah, I read Otherland, and probably need to reread it. What happened is, I read the first volume when it came out, waited for the second volume…you get the picture.
Does anyone know what the expected release date is for the next volume of Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire? It seems like it’s been forever since the last one.
A third for George R.R. Martin, great stuff, will the next one ever be finished?
I believe A Feast For Crows is done, and is in production. I’m not sure when it will actually be out. (I’m also not sure how I feel about the series. Bits of it are great, but there isn’t a lot of forward progress — I think I might have enjoyed it more at a fifth the length.)
Yup. Here’s the announcement that it’s done and in production.
Also, I second the recommendation for Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Great stuff.
Thanks for the link, LB. Good to know, but I’m not sure I’m wild about the whole splitting it into two books thing. I happen to like monstrously long, complicated fantasy novels. This solution just ensures that I’ll have completely forgotted who all the characters are by the time Dance With Dragons comes out.
Hopefully it won’t turn into Robert Jordan syndrome.
Ugh, Robert Jordan. Started so well. Finshed so, well I don’t know I’m completely bored and he isn’t even finished.
I can’t reccommend Erikson highly enough. The Malazan series is amazingly good, and one excellent part is that each book is relatively complete by itself–they should be read in order, but at the end of each book you aren’t immediately worried that he will die before finishing the series leaving you with nothing satisfying. Unfortunately most of the later books have to be ordered from outside the US. I believe only the first two of the five that are out are available in the US.
sebastian: If you like Dresden too I will try out your recommendation. Gardens of the Moon is on order 🙂
I was going to mention “A Song of Ice and Fire” when I first saw this post, but didn’t really have the time to give it a proper endorsement. Glad to see many of you also like it. The first volume is “A Game of Thrones” if you’re interested in checking it out.
And I’ll also say that if you think you might be remotely interested in maybe considering watching even just a little of Firefly, go out and buy the DVDs. They’re great. Only ten more weeks (I think) until Serenity!
And I’ll also say that if you think you might be remotely interested in maybe considering watching even just a little of Firefly, go out and buy the DVDs. They’re great. Only ten more weeks (I think) until Serenity!
Or, if you can’t afford the DVDs, you can catch it on the Sci-Fi channel tomorrow night .
I endorse Firefly for sci-fi lovers with every fibre of my being.
Ugh, Robert Jordan. Started so well. Finshed so, well I don’t know I’m completely bored and he isn’t even finished.
Agreed. I read the first 5 or so, then it became apparent that he was just going to go on and on and on. No series presenting a storyarc should be more than 5 books long – and really, 5 is pushing it.
However I will make an exception for Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series – great escapist historical fiction. Even if the writing could be better, at least she’s done her homework.
Catsy, thanks for the Firefly headsup.
OK, enough recs from serious readers that I’ll check out the G. Martin series. The titles–so bland!–had really turned me off, and these days I’m really into the single-volume novel. Chastened, I head off to the NYPL reservations site.
Before I go. There’s part of me that *loves* the data-dump novel. Stephenson can get a bit out of hand with it (and IMO the tendency gets worse over the Baroque cycle), but for Eco, the data is the plot. (When I was a teenager, I reread Foucault’s Pendulum about once a year. Then I realized it was a satire. It’s been awhile since I’ve picked it up again.)
Just so you know, the Dresden books are in the ‘fun romp’ category while the Erikson books are more in the serious fantasy drama style. (In case you only like one of those genres). One of the most interesting things about the books is the way he plays out what many people screw up–the high-powered characters. His world is teeming with them yet somehow it doesn’t get boring they way other books with god-like characters get. As someone else said: there is a guy who at one point in his life threw a fit and personally destroyed everything living on a continent, he is only maybe the third or fourth most powerful character in the book….
For the “fun romp” type books, has anyone read any of Margaret Ball’s work? (These are funny fantasy novels for the most part, but may be sort of girly, I suppose. I think she used to edit an anthology called Chicks in Chainmail :P)
I’ve been trying to track down a copy of Mathemagics for a good while now, with no luck. Though Changeweaver is my favourite of her books, despite being a little more serious.
Wow, you guys are, uh, nerds! Can I come and play?
So, any reading suggestions? I loved the Vinge books and am starting “Peace War”… But, I like Stephenson as well but havn’t read anything since “Cryptonomicron”, which of his others would you recommend? Basically, I have 3 weeks until school starts for me and outside reading may be impossible after that.
I think with Stephenson, it sort of comes down to how fast you read. 😛 If you can get through 900 or so pages, three times over, in three weeks, I recommend the Baroque Cycle. It gets pretty slow in the first part of The System of the World, but the first two books are great fun.
If you can’t make the time commitment, try Zodiac, as recommended earlier by lots of people.
Sebastian: That is why I ordered only the first boek. But I like trying out new things (for me). That is how I happened upon the Dresden files (I like his first two books in the Codex Alera too btw) – and after recommendations here I ordered the Phantom Tollbooth and loved it.
And most of the other books mentioned here are allready in the bookshelves – me and spouse are both SF/Fantasy lovers with him edging more towards the hardcore techno stuff and me edging more towards the ‘escape literature’ kind of fantasy. Though we both loved Richard Morgans books, and Peter Hamilton’s Reality Disfunction trilogy so there is middle ground 🙂
I think with Jordan, the problem is time-scaling. With each successive book, the timespan covered seems to be cut in half. Kind of a literary Zeno’s Paradox, except it seems to take him twice as long to write a book covering half the time, so maybe he doesn’t stand a chance of finishing before he dies.
Plus, the overemphasis on clothing, wine punch and interpersonal bickering is driving me crazy. It’s as if he knows he has his audience captive, and has decided to torture us.
as she crossed her arms beneath her breasts….
Pure Torture