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Post by eatersthemanfool on Oct 25, 2017 12:14:44 GMT -5
I've started the second book in the Divine Dungeon series. It's.. I dunno. It's not great. The first one wasn't either. But it's enjoyable enough.
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Post by novicola on Oct 25, 2017 16:05:02 GMT -5
Just finished Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt. Liked it as much as Brothers Sisters. deWitt has a breezy style, but not one laking in substance. Looking forward to whatever he writes next.
Couldn't finish Armada by the same guy who wrote Ready Player One, which I never read but assumed was good on account Steven Motherfucking Spielberg is adapting it as a big movie event. Now I'm not quite so sure I even want to bother. Best thing I can say about Armada is the dust jacket, proving that old axiom...
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Post by Ike on Oct 25, 2017 16:11:07 GMT -5
Ready Player One is very bad and has Japanese characters who actually aspire to be techno samurai and are kinda really racist. Also they babble about "honor" a lot.
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Post by GamerL on Oct 25, 2017 18:00:05 GMT -5
I thought Ready Player One was ok, but it's officially been decreed by the culture at large that it's something you have to hate.
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Post by silentstorm on Oct 25, 2017 18:04:21 GMT -5
Not only that, but the book is pretty bland and generic trying to hide that with a ton of references from the 80's and earlier.
No, this story doesn't suck, here, have the characters playing Joust!
Oh look, a puzzle based entirely on Zork, isn't that cool!?
Hey look, MechaGodzilla fighting mechas from old anime like Raideen, and old Tokusatsu like the Leopardon, the robot that the japanese Spider-Man had, and the freaking original Ultraman, isn't that so cool it makes you forget that the characters barely have any personality or depth(if they have any) with them and the story only moves along so we can get to more references!?
I didn't really like the book and i actually understood the references which will likely be changed because most people don't care about Zork or old Dungeons and Dragons modules.
Don't bother with the book, not even Wil Wheaton could make that book interesting in audiobook form.
Anyways, picked up the audiobook for Worm, a super hero story, i would read it in written form but it's really really big, like 1.7 millions words long so that should last for a while, it also has it's fans and i am finding it overrated but i still like it more than Ready Player One so far.
Besides that, i also started reading the Ciaphas Cain series, not really a Warhammer 40K fan but these books are suprisingly not grimdark, full of space marines or trying to be cool all the time, actually having a bit more of a sense of humor and willing to show and talk about how people in that universe live during calmer times, it also has a main character that isn't a space marine who tends to win by being smart and pragmatic alongside quite a bit of luck who just wants to stop getting himself in all kinds of dangerous situations, see, if the rest of the franchise was like this, i would actually be a Warhammer 40K fan.
Lastly, i am also reading The Crime Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) by DK Publishing, just a book talking about various crimes throughout history, how they were conducted, the criminals and their fates and the victims, so far i am liking this book.
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Post by GamerL on Oct 25, 2017 19:42:54 GMT -5
The thing that worked about Ready Player One best to me is simply as an exploration of where video games might be headed in the future, all those references worked because it made you imagine what it would be like to be in an immersive virtual environment with all that stuff.
The story is a pretty simple "hero's journey" sure and the characters aren't exactly deep (but they're not unlikable in my opinion) but it's depiction of what the future might be like felt pretty believable.
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Post by edmonddantes on Oct 26, 2017 0:03:00 GMT -5
I have a tradition of reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings once a year, and I'm near the end of that run. I'm reading them aloud for my sister's kids, and its revealed to me that those books were really designed to be narrated, not just read (and yes, I do voices for the characters... which makes me dread any chapter that has Treebeard).
Otherwise, I recently started reading a Forgotten Realms novel called Azure Bonds, which was apparently the inspiration for the Gold Box game "Curse of the Azure Bonds" (altho I can already tell you the game's only take-away from the novel is the concept of having mysterious tattoos that sometimes take control of the hero--in the book its just one girl so cursed, in the game its your entire party). So far its actually a pretty interesting novel. Not great, but its interesting light reading that's worth a look if you can find it.
For awhile I was trying to read the Lensman saga. For anyone else trying to pick this up: The first book is Galactic Patrol, NOT Triplanetary (its a situation similar to how in Star Wars, Phantom Menace is called Episode I but was actually made decades aftet Episodes 4, 5, and 6). From what I've heard people who start from Galactic Patrol love Lensmen but people who start with Triplanetary hate it... a fate I imagine will afflict Star Wars in fifty years.
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Post by The Great Klaid on Oct 26, 2017 0:54:46 GMT -5
Hey I just finished the Silmarillion, and am now reading the Dark Elf trilogy.
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Post by GamerL on Oct 26, 2017 6:21:32 GMT -5
While I'm still a little confused, I've pretty much gotten over it as the latest Anno Dracula is excellent as always.
I'm really amazed how Kim Newman has been writing this series for 25 years and has maintained a consistent high quality, not even Stephen King could pull that off with Dark Tower.
I really can't recommend this series enough, even if you're not normally into vampires, this is nothing at all like Anne Rice or whatever, these are honestly some of my favorite books that I've ever read.
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Post by toei on Oct 26, 2017 21:26:45 GMT -5
I've been curious about Psycho 2. Supposedly instead of a straightforward sequel it's this weird satire of Hollywood splatter films. Universal hated it so much that they just pretended it didn't exist and had an original script written for the Psycho 2 movie. Unfortunately, I can't find it at any of the big libraries in town. It's one of the obscure books where the only way to read it is probably to order a used paperback on ebay or something.
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Oct 26, 2017 21:50:58 GMT -5
RP1 is not a "good book" by any stretch. It's just entertaining nonstalgia fap. I still liked it, though.
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Post by silentstorm on Oct 27, 2017 8:31:47 GMT -5
RP1 is not a "good book" by any stretch. It's just entertaining nonstalgia fap. I still liked it, though. Yeah, that's the thing, it's not good, but i have to admit i did smile at some references and some of the situations in the book involving pop culture elements and characters, the idea of going through 80's pop culture is a fun one, even if by the end it goes a bit into 60's and 70's japanese pop culture with old Tokusatsu and anime references for some reason. It's just, when the book isn't shoving references, it stops being fun or that interesting sadly, then again, like i said, it's fun seeing the pop culture elements appear and interact, for example, as an Ultraman fan, i freaking love the idea of the original Ultraman fighting MechaGodzilla, that is just awesome as hell.
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Post by Serah on Oct 27, 2017 11:23:22 GMT -5
So, Blindsight was excellent. If you're into hard sci-fi and psychological horror, you absolutely need to read it. It's free in ebook format on Peter Watts' site if you're a filthy Kindle user, like me. It has some really, really interesting ideas about what alien life could be like and plays with a lot of fairly typical transhuman ideas in a cool way. The protagonist is simultaneously kind of unlikable and yet hard to dislike at the same time.
Since then I've also read The House Next Door: A Ghost Story by Darcy Coates which is a fun little haunted house horror story made more compelling with a domestic abuse sub-plot that hits very close to home for me.
The similarly titled The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons is pretty good, too, though the characters can be annoying. It's kind of in a good way, though? They're not annoying because of how they're written or because they keep grabbing the idiot ball. It's more like how you dislike actual people. A lot of the characters are very two-faced, selfish and have that particular kind of suburban middle-class pretentiousness to them. They aren't all bad, though. Every character definitely has likable qualities, funny moments and a few of the characters are really lovely people. The way it frames the horror and builds it up over the course of the story is pretty great, too. It's kind of like if Desperate Housewives was a horror story right up until things get really dark. Some of the things considered scandalous or faux pas kind of date the book bit though.
Finally I just finished Bird Box by Josh Malerman. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where there's something wandering around outside that drives people to murderous and suicidal insanity as soon as they look at it. It basically alternates between a mother and her two children travelling blindfolded twenty miles down a river to a safe haven while something in the river is following them and that same mother holed up in a house with a group of other survivors while she was pregnant. The characters are likeable but not especially deep (outside of the protagonist, maybe) and the prose is mostly good but has a couple of spots with weird word choices but maaan is this book ever tense. It's paced absolutely perfectly and really gets the most out of the gimmick of characters being functionally blind half the time.
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Post by edmonddantes on Oct 28, 2017 3:39:05 GMT -5
I've been curious about Psycho 2. Supposedly instead of a straightforward sequel it's this weird satire of Hollywood splatter films. Universal hated it so much that they just pretended it didn't exist and had an original script written for the Psycho 2 movie. Unfortunately, I can't find it at any of the big libraries in town. It's one of the obscure books where the only way to read it is probably to order a used paperback on ebay or something. There's this hardcover volume that has all three of the Psycho books, which you can usually find pretty cheap. www.amazon.com/Three-Complete-Novels-Psycho-House/dp/0517093146(Well... it was cheap when *I* bought it.... looks like its gotten a little pricey) The second one is indeed kind of a commentary on Hollywood, and I wouldn't call it as good as the first book (I've never seen the movie sequels so I can't compare those). The third book was just kinda silly altogether, and in general I think I like Robert Bloch's Cthulhu mythos stories more than his Psycho books. @guy who just finished Silmarillion, how did you like it? I read that book last year during a power-outage, and probably need to revisit it... it makes me want to pick up the History of Middle-earth too, since that covers things like alternate versions of the Silm and even alternate versions of Lord of the Rings.
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Post by The Great Klaid on Oct 28, 2017 14:34:53 GMT -5
edmonddantes I could easily tell it wasn't done. It was just a mess of things happening way too fast. Things not getting any closure. And it was all sandwiched in between some goddamn classic stories.
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