Post: #151

(04-28-2017 02:07 PM)El Padrone Wrote:  Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time fantasy volumes. A disgraceful volume promoting feminist tripe.

My problem with WOT is that it took too damn long to tell the story. Never again will I read that series just because I want to do other things with my life. I tend to think that there are novels that do a far worse job for feminist tripe.

Post: #152

(04-28-2017 06:21 PM)Bluto Wrote:  

(04-28-2017 02:07 PM)El Padrone Wrote:  Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time fantasy volumes. A disgraceful volume promoting feminist tripe.

My problem with WOT is that it took too damn long to tell the story. Never again will I read that series just because I want to do other things with my life. I tend to think that there are novels that do a far worse job for feminist tripe.

Missed the deadline for editing as I was writhing my edit:

WOT also follows Fantasy Cliché's and motifs that can be annoying. One of them being female magic users only and the power that that they get from it. I can see how that can be construed as feministic tripe, and may be not off the mark, but once again a very common motif in fantasy.

Post: #153

(04-24-2017 05:14 PM)weambulance Wrote:  Well, I don't know how famous it is in the general population but I just tried reading John C. Wright's Somewhither, which won the Dragon Award last year for best science fiction novel...

I haven't read his novels, but I have read a couple of his award-nominated short stories as well as a number of his blog posts, etc.

He's a sharp guy, with some good insights and such, but boy is his prose pretentious and gassy. He's plainly got natural writing talent, you can see it filtering through the verbosity and sesquipedaly and needlessly stilted structure, but his writing overall comes off as the product of someone convinced by his middle-school English teacher that "real" writers must use a florid, pompous, and overwrought voice in everything they write. Including blog comments.

Post: #154

For me it is Harry Potter.

Post: #155

The Great Gatsby.

So boring.

Post: #156

Bluto, Lews Therin seemed like a cool character in the prologue of the first of the series, especially where the Dark One was taunting him over killing his own family. This motivated me to buy to see how shit plays out.

What I met was all male Aes Sedai wiped out because they destroyed the world due to their dumbness, and it was left to the female Aes Sedai to provide what Lews needed in his next incarnation.

Maybe he was following the motif set by no male Confessor being allowed to live in Sword of Truth, but he did it so incompetently like a bottom feeding hack it left a bad taste in my mouth. At least in SoT, the reason why was laid out compellingly and you just had to agree with the reasoning.

Today's fantasy writers are pure garbage.


Commentary on Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth.

The first book there, Wizards First Rule, in my opinion, stands as one of the greats of the Fantasy genre. No agenda, no pandering, just pure fantasy that produces a dopamine rush and leaves you impressed. A finely woven tale of simple magic, psycology, violence, danger, ambition and the dangers of unbridled power in one man.

It spolit me completely and gave me a palate for very fine writing only.

A gold standard of Fantasy.

Then he discovered his meal ticket, went to sleep, and let it all go to hell like Zimbabwe's currency.

Post: #157

Anything by Haruki Murakami. I keep trying to like him, because I know people who are smarter than me who love him, but I just can't do it.

Post: #158

(04-29-2017 04:14 AM)El Padrone Wrote:  Bluto, Lews Therin seemed like a cool character in the prologue of the first of the series, especially where the Dark One was taunting him over killing his own family. This motivated me to buy to see how shit plays out.

What I met was all male Aes Sedai wiped out because they destroyed the world due to their dumbness, and it was left to the female Aes Sedai to provide what Lews needed in his next incarnation.

It was not dumbness or stupidity. In the series, any male who was capable of becoming Aes Sedai was exposed to a taint by the Dark One and thus went insane. Lewis Therin was one of the first ones to go mad and killing his family is an example of his madness. Female Aes Sedai were not exposed to this insanity, and they had to either kill off the males or cut off their magical ability permanently.

Still this is part of the problem with the series, it takes a long time for the story to develop and you end up having to have an index for the cast of hundreds of characters that Robert Jordan wrote. We ended up with 14 books each around 800 pages. It takes someone years to read the full series. The last few books were not worth the time as they were very much dis-jointed. This is not his fault, as he died before the series was finished.

I did not read Terry Goodkind, but have heard some of the story and there was a series about it on WGN several years back that I saw. I was thinking of that series as well as being part of the cliché. I seem to recall a few others out there. I agree with you that the works of fantasy that are recently created are not worth the read. As far as my Gold Standard for Fantasy, I would say that LOTR is it for me. That is what I compare fantasy novels to, and none has come close to what JRR Tolkien wrote.

Post: #159

(04-29-2017 06:10 PM)Bluto Wrote:  I did not read Terry Goodkind, but have heard some of the story and there was a series about it on WGN several years back that I saw. I was thinking of that series as well as being part of the cliché.

The TV series was a quick, exploitative take on what was a controversial first book in the fantasy world.

Terry Goodkind's main appeal is that he's a right winger if not a libertarian in a genre that is so institutionally left wing it's painful. Put it this way, the very title of his book is Wizard's First Rule. Wizard's First Rule is: people are stupid. As the book puts it: people are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."

He's the Orson Scott Card of fantasy. They also share the attribute that they both wrote one good book in their genres and then went on to piss on their legacy.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #160

A few years ago I read the lats book of Song of fire and ice series: "A dance with dragons" I think.
It read as food porn mixed with violence porn sprinkled with a generous dose of regular porn.
Seriously,remove the food descriptions and see how the books shrink!

Post: #161

(04-30-2017 06:21 AM)El_Gostro Wrote:  A few years ago I read the lats book of Song of fire and ice series: "A dance with dragons" I think.
It read as food porn mixed with violence porn sprinkled with a generous dose of regular porn.
Seriously,remove the food descriptions and see how the books shrink!

Only read book one and two of that series before I dropped it. I agree in that it is basically porn and violence without much more to it. Both the TV and books to me are marginally entertaining. I would never buy the series, but I would watch it on Netflix if I was bored.

Post: #162

How many books mentioned in this thread are books that were "required reading" in school? For me, it's definitely A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. The book is boring, and none of the characters are particularly likable. I only read it because of school.

Post: #163

War and Peace the series was excellent but I havent read the book.

Great Gatsby was okay but wasnt that great.

Post: #164

War and Peace the series was excellent but I havent read the book.

Great Gatsby was okay but wasnt that great. I was skim reading half of the time.

Post: #165

Catch 22. Dunno, just couldn't get into it.

Crime and Punishment. The prose is so boring. Maybe it's better in the original Russian.

Good reads:
The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. Deep and psychological.
Anything by Cormac McCarthy but especially Blood Meridian and The Crossing.

Post: #166

That's interesting. I tried to read Hemingway and Jack London and could not get into it at all. Crime and Punishment I loved and read twice. The insights into human nature and the way the scenes are laid out is epic. Jane Austen, Neitzche and Dostoyevsky are my three favorite authors. I think Tolstoy is unreadable even though I want to read it. The way he writes supremely irritates me.

Ayn Rand is right up there with the best authors and I've always found her detractors totally unconvincing. They are snotty uppity types in academia or on the right and brainless libtards in the left. Ayn Rand's ideas are profound and her fiction is very important because it applies her philosophy to real world situations. She had libtard's number over 60 years ago! Her critque of government describes the Obambi administration to a T. Imagine that. Her ideas are timeless and she popularized them with her fiction. Her contemporaries like Milton Freidman and Hayek also had her vision but she took it one step further by showing how a persons mentality/philosophy results in freedom and prosperity or coercion and misery. That's profound stuff and I have no issues with her writing style (which is a pretty lame critique imo).

The real issue is that people simply don't "get" what she is saying due to their egos or because they are so emotionally attached to collectivist ideas that her words sail right over their heads. Which is ironic because her books describe the leftist mindset very clearly and she shows the results of having that mindset. Libtards could try reading and learn a lot from her but instead I predict that they will be smug and continue to wreak havoc on the western world.

Post: #167

^What do you like about jane Austens novels?

Post: #168

I like the way she describes universal situations and captures personality types with such accuracy. For example Lydia Bennet is such a typical type of female in Pride and Prejudice. That exact type exists today and it's interesting how Jane Austen shows the type of man such a girl falls for, etc.

She's very sly and witty and understands social conventions and the purpose they serve while understanding people's true nature and motives. She's one if those authors where you can read her books and recognize the characters and situations in everyday life and learn something useful. You could apply the knowledge when looking at the behavior of your girlfriend and her sisters or whatever the case may be. Overall I love her writing style. Other contemporaries such as the Bronte sisters, Dickens and Chaucer are totally unreadable and tedius to me. Not saying they aren't quality but I find them hard to read.

Post: #169

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Rober Pirsig

I have done a lot of reading over the years and have read a number of bad books, but these two are at my Pinnacle of Shittiness.

Post: #170

"Jude the Obscure", by Thomas Hardy, was indescribably poor.

Post: #171

Silas Marner, George Eliot was actually a pretty good writer at some points, but this is her worst book by far.

Post: #172

(08-09-2017 08:13 PM)1818Steve Wrote:  The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

Interesting. I quite liked it as a teenager, read it half a dozen times. I haven't read it in a long time, though. I don't have much taste for military media of any kind anymore.

Did you have to read it for school? I'm curious because I see it's on some school book lists these days.

Post: #173

Holy crap,

Wuthering Heights.

That book is absolutely terrible. Emily Bronte is like Shakespeare if Shakespeare sucked at language in general.

Post: #174

To Kill a Mockingbird

Post: #175

"Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger. Read it a few years ago on a whim and I still don't get it.