November's Nascent Nurturing of Novelistic Nexuses

[D_Davis]

Our Friends from Frolix 8.

Love this one. Very solid mid-tier effort. Don't think it quite breaks into my top 10, but it's close.

 

[Lord Soth]

Two books finished recently, standard and audio format.

Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn (standard) as recommended by you lot on here. Excellent, if a little sparse on detail and a little to short - my view probably influenced by reading GGK's effort. I'll definitely be following the series now. 7/10

Terminal World (Audiobook) by Alastair Reynolds was okay. I get the feeling that he made a rod for his own back when creating the whole zone thing, and the ending left many interesting questions unanswered which was annoying. I think he should have stripped down the centre part of the book by about half and added it to the end to tie things up properly. Annoying as its an audio book I couldn't even skim read the more boring and pointless bits.. I don't think I'll be buying any more audiobooks by him. 5.5/10.

I have just started The Iron Jackal by Chris Wooding which is lighthearted and fun so far, and par for the course. Audio wise I have started Seeds of Earth by Michael Cobley, which is promising to be a good book so far if a little hard to follow in some parts due to the audio format.

 

[GOLLUM]

Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn (standard) as recommended by you lot on here. Excellent, if a little sparse on detail and a little to short - my view probably influenced by reading GGK's effort. I'll definitely be following the series now. 7/10.

I'm glad you liked the the book overall. I was worried I'd given you a bumsteer. Anyway, the other books in the series are also good but I think that ANG is possibly still Hearn's best. It cretainly does pull you in with the storyline and the characters. It's not to everyone's taste thoguh and one probably (I suspect) needs to be a 'patient' reader willing to try somethnig a bit different to get their SFF fix from these books.

 

[GOLLUM]

Steven Erikson did go pretty much overboard with how many things he introduced right off the bat. When I first loaded the book and saw that I had quite a few pages of characters listed by their allegiances, I admit I got rather worried.
So far I'm enjoying the book and it's not extremely hard to follow. I can't make heads or tails of that whole Deck of Dragons gimmick, but I'm sure it'll eventually become more clear.
Finished the first "book" and on to the second. Rather gripping and I'm starting to enjoy characters, though I was actually worried for the fate of one that I quite enjoy.

Good to see you are continuing with the series. Some of the battle scenes in Book 2 are amongst the best I've read in SFF and Yes, that whole 'Deck of Dragons gimmick' should become clearer. What will be of greatest interest to me will be to read your thoughts on Book 3, what many Malazan fans still consider to be the best book of the series. It's in my top 5 EPIC SFF books of all time and would make a top 20 list of SFF novels for me..if I were to ever construct one that is....

As long as you accept to expect the unexpected you'll be fine...

 

[Lord Soth]

Argh stop talking about Malazan, it keeps tempting me with a full re-read but I don't want to commit to the full series, which of course I will have to do, as its spectacular...

 

[Fried Egg]

I've just decided that I'm going to turn this month into a female author only month (since I've been working my way through collections by Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore.

So, I think I'll take a short break from those and squeeze in "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" by Kate Wilhelm.

 

[Red 13]

"The alloy of Law" by Brandon Sanderson.I'm about a quarter way through and i'm really enjoying it so far.

 

[D_Davis]

So, I think I'll take a short break from those and squeeze in "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" by Kate Wilhelm.

There are obviously people that like this, but I have yet to meet one. Everyone one I know IRL thought is was incredibly dull.

 

[Hypnos164]

I finished The Born Queen by Greg Keyes which I thought was a worthy end to a very good fantasy series - I liked the way he managed to keep me guessing about how it was all going to unwind pretty much to the last few pages.

Also read Hard as Nails by Dan Simmons a slightly over the top hardboiled PI tale featuring Joe Kurtz. Dan Simmons certainly does seem to switch easily between genres writing like a native in each one.

Currently reading The Pheonix Code by Cathrine Asaro as part of an ongoing effort to read some of the stuff thats been sitting in the TBR pile for 5+ years...

 

[J-Sun]

Love this one. Very solid mid-tier effort. Don't think it quite breaks into my top 10, but it's close.

Yeah - I was kind of hesitant about this before I started, but got pretty optimistic after a few pages and I'm about a third of the way through now and it's going really well.

There are obviously people that like this, but I have yet to meet one. Everyone one I know IRL thought is was incredibly dull.

Well, if we ever met, I wouldn't break the unanimity - I didn't like it either. Brackett and Moore, on the other hand, are definitely not dull.

 

[Dave]

I've taken a break from Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, clever and funny though they are, but I needed some realism. I've just read Jack's Return Home by Ted Lewis which is the book the film Get Carter was based on. There is quite a lot of the book that is exactly the same, but much that is quite different. It is set in Doncaster, not Newcastle, for a start. I do like that film, but there were some parts of it that never seemed to fit, and they don't appear in the book. The ending is much better.

Now I'm going back to Jasper Fforde, but I'm going to read Shades of Grey. It concerns Chromatacia, a future dystopian society, and was recommended in the Jasper Fforde thread here.

 

[j d worthington]

So, I think I'll take a short break from those and squeeze in "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" by Kate Wilhelm.

There are obviously people that like this, but I have yet to meet one. Everyone one I know IRL thought is was incredibly dull.

Well, if we ever met, I wouldn't break the unanimity - I didn't like it either.

There's always got to be one to skew the results... in this case: me!

Admittedly, it has been some years since I last read this, but I recall thinking quite highly of it. It isn't what one could call a "normal" narrative sort of piece, but I do think it has an excellent narrative flow, and is beautifully written; one of the rare pieces of genuine literature to come out of the field of sf. (And oh, how that one is likely to get me a few scoldings....)

As for myself... finally finished The Devil's Dictionary; quite a piece, that one, as Bierce doesn't spare even his own strongly-held views from a thorough roasting.... Am now reading Letters of Ambrose Bierce, which gives a quite different view of the man than what one picks up from most of his writing; a much more genial one than one might expect....

 

[Montero]

Finished Julie E Czerneda "Survival" and have ordered the sequel. Interesting set up of human culture and alien races co-habiting on a planet. Comes in at the start of a major tipping point.
Very glad to have picked up on a recommendation of Julie E Czerneda last year on SFF.

I am re-reading John Barnes's Thousand Culture 4 book series.

Finished A Million Open Doors and onto Earth Made of Glass.

A Million Open Doors is one of my good place to re-visit books. It is not end to end cheery, but overall comes down on the side of upbeat. Earth Made of Glass is possibly my first re-read, or maybe my second. Not as upbeat as A Million Open Doors.

Both are complex and rich on possible human cultures, their internal interaction, their interaction with other cultures, and the things humans do from clever and beautiful to dumb and destructive.

Depending on what comes in the post, I'll either move on to re-read the next Thousand Cultures book or the next Julie E Czerneda.

(Oh, and this week is a holiday. Yay. Time to read best part of a book in a day and do other things too..........)

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I'm done with The Way of Kings. Very good book. I don't know if it's really to everyone's tastes, as it seems that most modern Fantasy now is geared towards being more 'gritty'. Lots of violence, lots of blood, lots of sex, lots of grey characters who have both evil and heroism within them. All that is good, of course, and I enjoy those, too (Abercrombie and Martin are among my favorite authors). Sanderson, meanwhile, seems to be more in the 'classic' Fantasy mould. Good guys are largely good, bad guys can be spotted easily enough, and we have PG-friendly alternatives to swearing ("Storm you!").

None of that is really a criticism, though. In fact, in some ways, it's actually quite remarkable that Sanderson can write a book (and a big one at that) that holds your interest despite not having some of the aforementioned 'surprising' characteristics. Of course, that could easily bring up a debate over when a surprise is not really surprising. Once you're known for twists, the twists don't really seem all that twisting, if you get my meaning.

I think there is definitely a place for authors like Sanderson. Authors who know how to spin a good tale, have a vivid imagination and a detailed world for you to immerse yourself in, and can make you feel a sense of danger and desolation while never letting go of the undercurrent of hope.

The book is not without its flaws. In particular, likely as a result of his work on The Wheel of Time, Sanderson seems to have picked up Jordan's habit of detailing unneeded minutiae like dresses and food content. On the whole, though, I found The Way of Kings to be a very engrossing novel, as evidenced by the fact that I finished this 1000+ page behemoth in about 9 days, which is unusually quick by my standards. And much like his Mistborn trilogy, the book is self-contained enough that it can be read as a stand-alone (no cliffhangers here). An excellent first entry into what will apparently be Sanderson's magnum opus, The Stormlight Archive. I would give it a solid 8 out of 10, which may go higher or lower in the future, depending on how it holds up once it simmers in my head for a bit.

And so I move on to The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

 

[D_Davis]

and is beautifully written; one of the rare pieces of genuine literature to come out of the field of sf. (And oh, how that one is likely to get me a few scoldings....)

Really? I found it to be quite poorly written. Maybe I don't really know what you mean by "literary," my isn't that a loaded word, but I found it painfully dull, uninteresting, unemotional, and shallow.

 

[soulsinging]

Was a bit underwhelmed by Alice, but can't win em all.

Going to take a crack at the Blue Sword by Robin McKinley. I read Hero and the Crown years ago but don't remember much about it other than that I enjoyed it a lot at the time, so I've got high hopes.

 

[Fried Egg]

Really? I found it to be quite poorly written. Maybe I don't really know what you mean by "literary," my isn't that a loaded word, but I found it painfully dull, uninteresting, unemotional, and shallow.

Maybe it's because I have heard lots of bad reports about this book just before I started that it lowered my expectations but so far I'm quite enjoying it. Anyway, I'll let you all know what I think when I finish...

 

[thatollie]

In the end, I decided to read Corum, The Prince in Scarlet Robes.

 

[HareBrain]

I've been re-reading The Magus by John Fowles, and am now about halfway through. I must have read this first about twenty years ago, and am getting much more out of it this time around -- partly because of life experiences in the intervening years, including visiting Greece, and partly through having started to write myself. I seem to have become much more intolerant of sloppy writing, but more appreciative of the good stuff, which Fowles delivers in spades. His description, without in any sense being flowery, is stunning, and seemingly effortless.

 

[Fried Egg]

Really? I found it to be quite poorly written. Maybe I don't really know what you mean by "literary," my isn't that a loaded word, but I found it painfully dull, uninteresting, unemotional, and shallow.

Maybe it's because I have heard lots of bad reports about this book just before I started that it lowered my expectations but so far I'm quite enjoying it. Anyway, I'll let you all know what I think when I finish...

Actually, I take that back, it has nothing to do with my expectations being lowered, this is a great book. I've not yet finished it but I'm enthralled. When I read your comments, I wonder how you could possibly be talking about the same book. I suppose people find different themes interesting but for me, one of the themes I find most interesting is the tensions that arise between the individual and the community. A theme that Sturgeon often explores so more to my surprise that you were not interested in it here.

Anyhow, never mind, I just enjoy being able to discuss the kinds of books I like reading even often people are affected by these books quite differently.