Bestbank Tiger
Deity
Takes a while to get going but the second half was good. Interestingly I could say the same about "Judaism In The New Testament".
Next up is Moonraker.
Takes a while to get going but the second half was good. Interestingly I could say the same about "Judaism In The New Testament".
Next up is Moonraker.
PhroX
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2009
- Messages
- 2,891
Yeah, it's not very good is it? Sanderson seems to have lost much of what made me enjoy his earlier books. I felt they were mainly plot focused - not that the characters were bad, but they weren't the main focus. They were storys about stuff happening, and as such, stuff happened. And Sanderson could write that kind of story in an exciting way. Frankly, that was IMO his biggest strength (contrary to what much of the internet seems to believe, I've always felt his worldbuilding is OK, but nothing special). Even in his longer works, like the first few Stormlight books, there was always that urge to turn the page to know what happens next. They weren't high literature, but they were fun reads, and that's a perfectly good thing.
Now he seems to have switched to focusing more on the characters while much less actually happens. And that is simply not something he can write well. His limited but functional prose is perfectly fine when describing things, but falls short when focusing on people and feelings, often getting very repetitive (for contrast, if someone like Guy Gavriel Kay wrote this book, I'd likely love it, his style fits this kind of story much better). Also, his obsession with everyone having mental illnesses - and not particularly well written ones at that - is weird.
Plus, the editing quality has dropped off a cliff. The last two Stormlight books could've lost 2/3rds of their length to no meaningful consequence in terms of story or character development. Someone really needs to say "NO" to him.
I had hoped Rhythm of War was just a blip, but it looks like this is a long term change in Sanderson's writing, and it's most definitely not for the better. He always seemed to me to be an author who knew his strengths and weaknesses and worked with that in mind, but now he's writing what he's not good at writing. Like you, I think I'm done with him, which is a pity cos I got a lot of enjoyment out of his earlier stuff.
That's a trope of successful writers. Their books get longer and longer, as editors seem increasingly unwilling (or unable) to edit them.
It's great. I have been able to move on to the two-liner.
bene_legionary
Believes in love
Finished the original Millenium trilogy in record time after finding the next two booms for free at a garage sale (how lucky!) I like Swedish noir... potentially.
One book I'd really like to read is Santa Esperanza by Aka Morchiladze. It's a Georgian novel about a fictional island country in the Black Sea and I'm attracted to it not only because of the promise of a fictional country with a richly crafted history but because it is another nonlinear book like The Dictionary of the Khazars. Only problem is, it has never been published in English, and I've only ever found a translation of the first "book" to the book, which is an excerpt from the country's fictional national tourism website. So I guess I'll have to learn Georgian or German first... >.<
One book I'd really like to read is Santa Esperanza by Aka Morchiladze. It's a Georgian novel about a fictional island country in the Black Sea and I'm attracted to it not only because of the promise of a fictional country with a richly crafted history but because it is another nonlinear book like The Dictionary of the Khazars. Only problem is, it has never been published in English, and I've only ever found a translation of the first "book" to the book, which is an excerpt from the country's fictional national tourism website. So I guess I'll have to learn Georgian or German first... >.<
A birthday gift from an Eastern European lady friend that lives in my neck of the woods. A little ways in and it is JR approved.
EnglishEdward
Deity
I have just finished reading
Crusade: The Untold Story of the Gulf War
by Rick Atkinson
Copyright 1993
As one suspected at the time, the US military overestimated the strength
of the Iraqi forces and prematurely ended their military attack.
Nevertheless Kuwait was successfully liberated.
Crusade: The Untold Story of the Gulf War
by Rick Atkinson
Copyright 1993
As one suspected at the time, the US military overestimated the strength
of the Iraqi forces and prematurely ended their military attack.
Nevertheless Kuwait was successfully liberated.
For those keeping score at home, you obviously know I have read Steinbeck's Cannery Row since my tracking started on October 2024. I read the Grapes of Wrath as a junior in high school and at least once since then. Everything in this volume is new to me. Steinbeck is the first author since October 2024 where I have hit a second work or group of works. I have read the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho twice in that timeframe.
The Cloak is probably the most important story in Russian literature, if we go by what it influenced (Dostoevsky famously attributed everything good in his era's literature to it). Of course Gogol was an excellent author and while indeed the ending is a rapid departure from what was going on before, I think the intention was to not have it all be so gloomy
You should also have a look at some of his other short stories, like The Nose and (of course) Diary of a Madman.
I will have a look at the Gorky story you mentioned, although I never read anything by Gorky.
(edit: I read it now, it was quite nice
)
Last edited:
EnglishEdward
Deity
I have just finished reading
The Warlord of the Air
by
Michael Moorcock
copyright 1971
A pleasant light alternative reality and time travel story.
The Warlord of the Air
by
Michael Moorcock
copyright 1971
A pleasant light alternative reality and time travel story.
Bonyduck Campersang
Not staring into the distance
- Joined
- Dec 11, 2022
- Messages
- 4,865
I have been trying to read the short stories of Saki (H.H. Munro) but they're too short and too simple for me.
I also finally read Death in the Dusk by Virgil Markham, after several years of fruitless searching until Project Gutenberg just quietly uploaded it this February. Didn't live up to the hype. The start is hopelessly confusing. I'm going to rant about it.
So chronologically what's happening is this. Our narrator, an amateur antiquarian, gets lost in the Welsh wilderness while trying to find the tomb of a medieval saint. He encounters two extremely outlandish characters, gets lost in the rain, gets chased by a bull, then somehow finds himself near a large country house. He knocks on the door, only to find the owner is a friend of his. While the owner makes arrangements for him, narrator meets two characters from the house party. Then he goes upstairs to his room, changes, then comes downstairs to the drawing room where he meets the rest of the party, save for two young ladies one of whom is nursing a headache and the other is attending to her. A series of strange events happen, and the party goes outside to investigate. Narrator sees a strange apparition who appears to resemble Parson Lolly. They then come upon the two young ladies, who also claim to have seen the Parson. Cut.
But how does the narrative actually go? The first part starts at the point our narrator is meeting the house party in the drawing room. We have no idea why he is there, and why any of the characters he is meeting are important. Also, the host and the two other characters that the narrator met are not introduced, the narrator simply states that he met them earlier. So we don't know who they are. This goes on until they go outside and encounter the missing women, and the narrator spends a longish time describing one of them. Why? We don't know! As don't know who she is, and why is she so important. And who is Parson Lolly? The first part ends here. The second part starts at the actual beginning with our narrator wandering the Welsh countryside, and abruptly ends just as he enters the drawing room.
What's frustrating about this is that the house party is huge. There's a lot of people cooped up at this house in the middle of nowhere. And the characters all blur into one another. None of them are really distinctive. And because of the nature of the story, most of them only have isolated moments in which they shine. So you might have a character, call him Smithers, who says something witty in Chapter 2, then effectively gets lost in the crowd, then pops up in Chapter 5 to advance the plot, then briefly pokes his head in Chapter 8 to chew the scenery with the narrator, then in Chapter 9 is mentioned as a serious suspect by the police detective. And that goes for most of the characters. And because each of them is a caricature (steel manganate who's secretly a sensitive artist, fussy old aristocrat whose purpose is to play the outraged conservative, witty doctor who provokes said aristocrat by talking about salacious Babylonian fertility rituals, etc.) you keep mixing them up. And here's the rub: because the narrative is disjointed into two different parts, and some of the characters are introduced in one and the rest in the other, turning back the pages to refresh your memory as to which character is supposed to be which is simply torture, because of course you don't remember which part which character was introduced in.
I never several other complaints, but not enough time to talk about them all: the mysterious events that happen seemingly just to pile on to the mystery (even though they get explained literally, they just feel like cheap scares at the time), the ridiculously childish bickerings of the house party members, the tendency of the narrator to get in snarky digs instead of talking like a normal human being, the token American character who talks like a British caricature of an American, characters who exist only either as background noise or to play a single part in the story and revert back to irrelevancy...
Also finished Flesh by Phillip José Farmer, a sci-fi story about a post-apocalyptic society just simply crazed about sex for some reason. It's very disgusting, even though it's not remotely as graphic as you would be lead to expect. The word-building is sometimes impressive and sometimes silly. I liked the Karelian pirates, and the Pants Elf who live in small villages outside civilization and go on raiding parties. The central mythology was also quite interesting, about a Sun-Hero and a Horned King (two originally separate figures who later got blurred into a single character), and the Great White Mother (Columbia) and her two daughters Virginia the pure high priestess and the deathless crone Alba. And there are the silly parts like the deadly ritualised baseball games (in one part, our hero faces almost certain death but challenges his attackers to a baseball game, which they absolutely cannot refuse due to cultural norms). The narrative is awkward and bumbling, and there is a strange moment when our heroes discuss the ethics of kidnapping the local women in order to take them back to space and propagate the human race, while they're in the hold of a Karelian pirate ship and little hope of getting out alive. Otherwise the book is strongest when we're exploring the strange facets of this post-apocalyptic civilization, and how relics of our current world and the apocalyptic disaster shape the mythologies of this world and how those in turn shape their society and culture. Still in the end, a 3/5 read. Could've been done better.
I also finally read Death in the Dusk by Virgil Markham, after several years of fruitless searching until Project Gutenberg just quietly uploaded it this February. Didn't live up to the hype. The start is hopelessly confusing. I'm going to rant about it.
So chronologically what's happening is this. Our narrator, an amateur antiquarian, gets lost in the Welsh wilderness while trying to find the tomb of a medieval saint. He encounters two extremely outlandish characters, gets lost in the rain, gets chased by a bull, then somehow finds himself near a large country house. He knocks on the door, only to find the owner is a friend of his. While the owner makes arrangements for him, narrator meets two characters from the house party. Then he goes upstairs to his room, changes, then comes downstairs to the drawing room where he meets the rest of the party, save for two young ladies one of whom is nursing a headache and the other is attending to her. A series of strange events happen, and the party goes outside to investigate. Narrator sees a strange apparition who appears to resemble Parson Lolly. They then come upon the two young ladies, who also claim to have seen the Parson. Cut.
But how does the narrative actually go? The first part starts at the point our narrator is meeting the house party in the drawing room. We have no idea why he is there, and why any of the characters he is meeting are important. Also, the host and the two other characters that the narrator met are not introduced, the narrator simply states that he met them earlier. So we don't know who they are. This goes on until they go outside and encounter the missing women, and the narrator spends a longish time describing one of them. Why? We don't know! As don't know who she is, and why is she so important. And who is Parson Lolly? The first part ends here. The second part starts at the actual beginning with our narrator wandering the Welsh countryside, and abruptly ends just as he enters the drawing room.
What's frustrating about this is that the house party is huge. There's a lot of people cooped up at this house in the middle of nowhere. And the characters all blur into one another. None of them are really distinctive. And because of the nature of the story, most of them only have isolated moments in which they shine. So you might have a character, call him Smithers, who says something witty in Chapter 2, then effectively gets lost in the crowd, then pops up in Chapter 5 to advance the plot, then briefly pokes his head in Chapter 8 to chew the scenery with the narrator, then in Chapter 9 is mentioned as a serious suspect by the police detective. And that goes for most of the characters. And because each of them is a caricature (steel manganate who's secretly a sensitive artist, fussy old aristocrat whose purpose is to play the outraged conservative, witty doctor who provokes said aristocrat by talking about salacious Babylonian fertility rituals, etc.) you keep mixing them up. And here's the rub: because the narrative is disjointed into two different parts, and some of the characters are introduced in one and the rest in the other, turning back the pages to refresh your memory as to which character is supposed to be which is simply torture, because of course you don't remember which part which character was introduced in.
I never several other complaints, but not enough time to talk about them all: the mysterious events that happen seemingly just to pile on to the mystery (even though they get explained literally, they just feel like cheap scares at the time), the ridiculously childish bickerings of the house party members, the tendency of the narrator to get in snarky digs instead of talking like a normal human being, the token American character who talks like a British caricature of an American, characters who exist only either as background noise or to play a single part in the story and revert back to irrelevancy...
Also finished Flesh by Phillip José Farmer, a sci-fi story about a post-apocalyptic society just simply crazed about sex for some reason. It's very disgusting, even though it's not remotely as graphic as you would be lead to expect. The word-building is sometimes impressive and sometimes silly. I liked the Karelian pirates, and the Pants Elf who live in small villages outside civilization and go on raiding parties. The central mythology was also quite interesting, about a Sun-Hero and a Horned King (two originally separate figures who later got blurred into a single character), and the Great White Mother (Columbia) and her two daughters Virginia the pure high priestess and the deathless crone Alba. And there are the silly parts like the deadly ritualised baseball games (in one part, our hero faces almost certain death but challenges his attackers to a baseball game, which they absolutely cannot refuse due to cultural norms). The narrative is awkward and bumbling, and there is a strange moment when our heroes discuss the ethics of kidnapping the local women in order to take them back to space and propagate the human race, while they're in the hold of a Karelian pirate ship and little hope of getting out alive. Otherwise the book is strongest when we're exploring the strange facets of this post-apocalyptic civilization, and how relics of our current world and the apocalyptic disaster shape the mythologies of this world and how those in turn shape their society and culture. Still in the end, a 3/5 read. Could've been done better.
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