What book are you reading?

ToomuchFluffy 2020-04-01 17:40:42 UTC #4425

I have finished Titus Groan a few days ago. It’s about the castle Gormenghast and the strange exaggerated people that live in there. It wasn’t an easy read and I read through the first half in chunks of just 10-20 pages rather slowly, but while it’s something that required a lot of concentration and frequently threw words at me I had never heard before, there is a lot of really sophisticated and often just very enjoyable writing in there. Lots of descriptive writing about places and people and atmosphere and so forth. The book is kind of dark overall, but there is always an accompanying sense of humour, sometimes punctured by particularly ridiculous events or descriptions. It’s a very strange mix that works somehow.

Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen-series) was a much easier read, though in this case a re-read and I finished it today. I didn’t much like it the last time, but since I do have the second book in the series I wanted to give that one a try and so thought that a re-read of GotM was in order. I’m still not sure if the good outweighs the bad, but I already knew what to expect so that my expectations were adjusted accordingly.

Sarfrin 2020-04-01 19:10:23 UTC #4426

I’ve never made it through the whole trilogy because the writing is so vivid I feel like I’m there and it’s an uncomfortable place to be.

LexW 2020-04-01 19:15:11 UTC #4427

Malazan, Malazan, Malazan… Has there ever been a more overhyped and disappointing and just kind of Emperor’s New Clothes-y series of novels in the history of the fantasy genre? Maybe, but I can’t think of it, unless it’s Thomas Covenant.

I mean, I read six books in. So I can’t say I wasn’t part of the problem. I really loved this idea of a fantasy world with a detailed history that spanned back hundreds of thousands of years, and the fact that there a lot of undead/semi-dead/ex-dead parties involved in all these various wars, but good god it was flawed. I think, ignoring the issues with bad dialogue, endless lore-dumps (which to be fair are also part of the charm), and personality-free characters (I mean, I bet if I took dialogue from say, ten of the main characters, no-one who had only read the books once or twice could identify who said it - they all have the same “voice”, despite affectations), it has two flaws which are kind of hard to detect initially, but just keep coming up over and over:

Tonally, it’s a complete fucking mess. I’ve never seen any book with such poorly-handled and inconsistent tone. Sometimes it is outright trying to be comedic, but the dialogue doesn’t indicate it, and the subject matter is inappropriate, and I only know it was because the author said so. Other times, it’d deadly fucking serious about something both hilarious and stupid, and again, the tone of the writing and so on is indecipherable. In the last book I read, there’s an entire massive subplot which was apparently supposed to be funny, but there’s no way to really detect that, and it isn’t. And we’re supposed to take this parody-level idiot of a character, who is like a magic libertarian economic genius in a bathrobe (ugh - he is the very definition of the word “douchebag”) largely seriously, and to not see him as a parody of other, vaguely similar characters in genre writing (albeit usually in sci-fi). He’s practically a Terry Pratchett character, only in a Pratchett novel he’d end up being banged up by the Watch or something.

Which brings me to the second issue:

The fucking characters. I know Malazan is based on an extremely long-running pen and paper RPG campaign played/DM’d by the author, which spanned two systems (AD&D 1E, then GURPS), so a little bit of silly business is to be expected, but good god you can basically see the characters who were Player Characters in the RPG (or the dreaded GMPCs, even worse) a fucking mile off. They’re all ludicrously overblown and ridiculous nonsenses of characters, who are just a giant pile of tropes and overpowered abilities and eye-roll-inducing magic items, with some sham of a personality. Now to be fair, several of them do have style. Which is unfortunate, really, because it helps mask just how profoundly fucking awful they are. And what’s really sad is, a list by fans of “best Malazan characters” is a basically a list of these totally shit characters, these fucking embarrassments to writing. The worst offenders are Anomander Rake, who I am sure I have mentioned before, and is clearly a 13-year-old D&D-player’s idea of “Elric but, like, totally badass!”, and Tehol Beddict (aforementioned magical libertarian), who is a 16-year-old who just read Atlas Shrugged’s fucking terrible idea of totally badass character for a fantasy campaign. He’s definitely from when the game was in GURPS, because everything about him screams “GURPS character”. Let’s not even talk about Icarium, who is such an edgy fucking teenager of a character that it’s one keeps forgetting he’s immortal, not 14.

I feel slightly sick just typing about them.

I don’t consider the Malazan series a total loss. If you’re going to write fantasy, or DM fantasy RPGs, they’re full of good concepts you can steal, and the writing and characters serve as a valuable lesson of “what not to do”. Plus I will always have a soft spot for undead neanderthals.

Yup. I feel like Stanley-Robinson’s Mars trilogy really gave me expectations about The Expanse that it never even came near to reaching.

ToomuchFluffy 2020-04-02 07:11:43 UTC #4428

That’s exactly what I’m scared of. It already kind of has happened with Stormlight Archive. Reading that far in and convincing myself to continue and then eventually souring on it enough that I just have to break it off.

That’s honestly the only aspect I’m still interested in. The wars, politics, factions and individuals involved. But even there GotM had some pretty weak moments and like so many other elements - like the characters as you mentioned - the large scale-context is also often treated very superficially. Especially the last 100-200 pages of GotM introduce so much stuff that is barely described or explained at all. The Pannion Seer is one good example. He is just mentioned a few times towards the end, completely without preamble and with almost no details. It’s almost as if Erikson wanted to keep the topic a mystery, but that doesn’t really work when the Pannion Domin is actually shown on the map and everyone of any importance clearly had to know about that large political entity.

Aside from that specific issue, characters and non-human races are often barely described visually, demons are thrown in there, but we don’t really know their significance except that they are more or less powerful on some kind of scale that is never defined in any way, so that the distinction becomes mostly meaningless. I know that Anomander Rake is the most powerful and that gods are supposedly powerful, but in case of the latter only unless the author declares otherwise. Ganoes Paran should have staid dead. I’m disappointed.

Good point, though what annoyed me most here is that characters (Lorn and Paran especially) are clearly supposed to be cynical characters that doubt their role in things, but the way this is written just makes them obviously inconsistent and completely unbelievable characters. They seem to reflect the author’s attitude on these things more than anything. But there are already better, more fitting characters and groups for these kinds of musings.

That explains a lot. Maybe it’ll help to keep that in mind.

I honestly didn’t mind him most of the time. Not a great character and not believable as an actual non-human, but at least he had good excuses for being “powerful” whereas that aspect was a total random mess with Paran. Have I mentioned that I dislike Paran?

LexW 2020-04-02 08:57:03 UTC #4429

I guess for me the problem is that Rake is so obviously both someone’s cheesy player character, and a juvenile attempt to one-up Michael Moorcock’s character Elric on every possible front (whilst remaining close, conceptually) that I can’t get over it. The more familiar you are with Elric and how pen and paper RPG players can act, the more irritating it is, I think.

Whereas Paran is just really fucking boring. Like so boring. And he won’t go away. He just keeps coming back, book after book, and I can barely remember who he is every time because good god he’s boring. Rake I guess has the advantage in not being actively boring.

Shadoko 2020-04-02 16:11:50 UTC #4430

That fucking name.
It sounds like a mix between a randomly generated Elite Dangerous NPC and a very painful instrument of torture.

Honestly, these days, anything that’s more than three books long gets a hard pass from me, unless it’s a series of mostly interconnected stories in the same universe ala Culture cycle.

ToomuchFluffy 2020-04-02 17:04:38 UTC #4431

That’s understandable. The only book by Moorcock I have is The History of the Runestaff and I haven’t yet read through it. I didn’t even know about Elric before he wasn’t mentioned in this thread at some point.

LexW 2020-04-02 19:20:06 UTC #4432

Yeah I’ve talked before about how bizarre it is that Elric and Moorcock, despite being massively influential on D&D, Warhammer, and Warcraft, the three biggest fantasy IPs that aren’t LotR, as well as on a lot of modern fantasy in general, is just basically unknown to huge swathes of people who read fantasy (let alone a broader audience). I do think it’s largely down to him not being published much in the 1990s and 2000s, and I think that was because he didn’t get into the trend of writing fantasy epics in the traditional “giant book” way. He tells epic tales, but they’re constructed of series of smaller stories/books which are perhaps less marketable (much like Fritz Leiber or Robert E Howard). I suspect all the Elric material together is probably less than 1000 pages, and we regularly see fantasy “novels” being put out around that size now. He’s not even as “problematic” as Tolkien so it can’t be that.

ToomuchFluffy 2020-04-24 06:25:59 UTC #4434

I did finish Deadhouse Gates (Malazan 2) yesterday and I definitely liked it more than Gardens of the Moon. In fact, one of the reasons why I started reading the series again is that GotM ranks comparatively lowly for people who have read through the whole series, whereas DhG - which I already had lying around anyway - is often ranked highly. Some of the issues that Gardens had are still there of course, especially as far as the character-writing is concerned, but overall I am honestly surprised how much better the writing is in general. One big reason for that is most likely that Erikson seemed to take his time more with this one. Character descriptions are still often flimsy, but at least demons and magical powers and such aren’t thrown around quite as willy-nilly anymore. The lack of well-defined rules can still often make the fantastical aspects feel insubstantial and not always really earned, but the book overall just suffered less from “big events out of the blue with little preparation and too much cheesiness”, so to speak.

Other than that I’m almost done with Banker’s New Clothes by Martin Hellwig and Anat Admati. It’s basically an attempt to take a look at the arguments of Bankers against significant reforms. A lot of it deals with the need for more equity. It’s perfect for somebody like me who doesn’t really have much of a clue about Banking and I only remember one instance where I couldn’t quite follow. For anybody interested in the topic most of the talks on youtube by Martin Hellwig and Richard Werner are in English and both are well worth listening to. Though a good amount of what I have found by Hellwig is much more technical than in this book, so that it might be hard to follow without some foreknowlege.

Det.Bullock 2020-05-06 21:26:20 UTC #4435

I’ve been reading the Worlds of Honor anthologies from the second volume onwards. The first volume’s stories are apparently mostly prototypes for the Honorverse rather than stories set in the 'verse itself and the one that is has been expanded into the first Stephanie Harrington spin off novel rather than being a separate prequel/pilot to the spin off series like some stories in later books.
By and large they are interesting stories, some fill in backstories that are only vaguely hinted at in the full novels (both mainline and spin offs) others just go into parts of the honorverse that just aren’t elaborated on in the novels like how is life for a very unlucky lower class Grayson woman.

I’ve also read Thrawn: Treason.
It’s the third new canon Thrawn novel by Timothy Zahn. It’s set shortly before the ending of Rebels and like the previous novel is more concerned with his divided loyalties between the Empire and the Chiss Ascendancy than his dealings with Phoenix Squadron.
There is also a nice cameo of Captain Pallaeon, though his original role is mostly filled by Commodore Faro and his former guide/protegé Eli Vanto.
It’s interesting that the Chiss Ascendancy understanding of the Force is radically different from that of the Jedi and the Sith, completely devoid of the spiritual side and thus inherently imperfect, their force sensitives are all very young and rapidly lose their powers with age with few exceptions. Their use also seems mostly limited to hyperspace navigations as navigation computers can’t deal with the everchanging dangers of the Unknown Regions hyperlanes.
I wonder how much is true about the rumoured sequel to Rebels being set around the Chiss Ascendancy with Thrawn and Ezra Bridger in an uneasy alliance because they seem to fit both what is laid out both in this novel and in the Rebels finale.

BillButNotBen 2020-05-07 01:31:20 UTC #4436

I haven’t seen any of Rebels, or basically any of the new-canon-EU.

I always rather liked the original Thrawn Trilogy, though I thought their reputation was a bit overblown. But they tied in to Tie Fighter and Jedi Knight, so I was happy.
Given they nixxed the old EU, but now seem to have brought back large parts of it, does that mean that the new Thrawn novels by Zahn overwrite the old ones? Or are the old ones kinda canon* again?
They had Mara Jade in them, right? So I guess they can’t be.

Thrawn was a cool bad guy, though I worry that revealing too much about him would undermine the character.

[edit]
*Though recently I’ve started to go seriously off the entire idea of ‘canon’. Probably due to a Lindsay Ellis video on the idea.

Det.Bullock 2020-05-07 02:46:24 UTC #4437

No, the old novels were after ROTJ while the new novels are around the same time as Rebels, that is 4 or 5 years before ANH. Also Rebels’ ending sure as hell doesn’t fit with the old novels.
Remember, everything that came before the acquisition is not canon apart from the 3D cartoon, even when the same character come back in the new canon they are always recontextualized and reimagined, sometimes rather radically.
Thrawn is mostly recontextualized though, he’s still basically Sherlock Holmes as an imperial admiral it’s just that his backstory has been fleshed out and is now dealing with the early rebellion and various imperial stuff rather than the New Republic.
Also no Ysalamiri, because Lucas apparently stated to the people that made Clone Wars that the idea of a creature that cancelled the Force around it was nonsense since the Force is a function of life itself.

BillButNotBen 2020-05-07 07:10:50 UTC #4438

So no games of Hide the Ysalamiri?

I got the sense that a fair bit of Solo, which I watched a few days ago, was refering to new-EU stuff from Clone Wars / Rebels… so I had a vague idea about some of the names, but no idea of any of the details. Which was mainly frustrating.

I realized I forgot to footnote my previous ‘canon*’ so…

*Though recently I’ve started to go seriously off the entire idea of ‘canon’. Probably due to a Lindsay Ellis video on the idea.

Det.Bullock 2020-05-07 13:33:26 UTC #4439

Multiplayer games aren’t really that beholden to canon, it’s the story driven content that is kept under watch to avoid another “operation Skyhook”.

Solo doesn’t really reference THAT much other than the cameo from you-know-who (the rest is mostly window dressing), the rest is mostly stuff cribbed from early EU novels about Han Solo apparently.
The Teras Kasi martial art bit for example is a piece of EU I was only vaguely aware of.

Det.Bullock 2020-05-11 13:34:17 UTC #4440

So, since I’m lazy and go with what I know I started the Manticore Ascendant saga (well, the short story in the anthologies might have contributed).
Remember the professional, disciplined and technologically advanced even if a bit cronyist and nepotist Manticoran Navy of the Honor Harrington era?
Well, forget it.
At the time these novels are set in the navy is undermanned, understaffed, under-everything and the cronyism and nepotism is countless times worse. Plus their tech is often obsolete at worst, average at best, they have most of the ships in mothballs and the Chancellor of the Excequer is determined to strip it down to a glorified coast (well, hyperlimit) guard because apparently he decided that living in one of the most dangerous parts of space with entire pirate fleets roaming around raiding planets is only a small detail in comparison of the general budget cuts he wants to operate.
In this context we have spacer (which here is the equivalent of “sailor”) Travis Uriah Long, a stickler for the rules when most noncoms and officers think the rules are sort of a loose guideline, completely out of his depths with the office politics and most of all he actually wants to do his job which is rare on all levels of this navy.
If this reminds you a bit of the new Thrawn novels: the books have been co-written by Timothy Zahn, I suspect he might have a type regarding protagonists.

Det.Bullock 2020-05-20 16:43:03 UTC #4441

So I’ve read the first Witcher book (Last Wish in english, Il Guardiano degli Innocenti in Italian) and I got the impression that videogame Geralt has been flanderized a bit.
I mean, I only played the first two games so I don’t knwo if Geralt in The Witcher 3 is different but here Geralt actually laughs every once in a while.

Sarfrin 2020-05-20 18:52:28 UTC #4442

He does have a bit of a (very dry) sense of humour in 3, especially in the dlcs.

BillButNotBen 2020-05-30 07:16:14 UTC #4443

This looks kinda interesting

I’m nearing the end of Ancillary Justice. I’d wanted to read it for ages, since seeing it mentioned here and thinking it sounded interesting. Also because the cover is cool sci-fi art.

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

The first half of the novel is really rather dull. Very little happens, and it happens very slowly. But mainly it’s all told in a calm measured way that sucks most of the drama and emotion out of the events and the characters.
Then suddenly, just over half way through, things start to happen, and it starts to get interesting and have a few interesting ideas.

We’ll see how it ends, but I did nearly give up in the first half.

[edit] Well, it ended much sooner than I expected as it turned out the last 10% of the book was an interview with the author and a preview of another novel from the publisher.

The ending was ok but seemed a but forced to set up another book in the series.

So, actually, the book only really gets going and interesting in the last 30-40% of the book.

Skalpadda 2020-05-30 15:33:55 UTC #4444

Yeah, the first half is mainly character and world building. I enjoyed all of it, but if you don’t like this one there’s a good chance you won’t like the other books in the series as they’re mostly structured the same. I’d say there are good ideas throughout and I liked the character stuff, but if you crave action that’s delivered in fairly sparse portions throughout.

BillButNotBen 2020-05-31 01:06:52 UTC #4445

Character and world building I have no problem with, but there was something about the writing for the first half that made it all sound very hands-off and unengaging and not very involving.

I thought it was just the writer’s style, but things seemed more interesting in the second half when things started happening. I mean, a few things did happen in the first half, but they were limited incidents scattered throughout.

I think part of it was that the entire novel is told from the viewpoint(s) of One Esk, who due to her nature is already somewhat cold and detached and 3rd person (despite being in 1st person). Plus most of the 1st half of the novel is her relating flashbacks of previous events to set up her motivation for taking action in the second half. She’s also, due to her nature, mostly passive for those past events.

Combine that with her mixing up pronouns (interesting idea, but not sure it really worked) and you end up with a very detached view of events.
It was all a bit 'I woke up. I brushed my teeth. I walked into the room. I killed 10 people. I bought a doughnut."

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I started to get much more involved in things once they arrived at the station, and when things switched to the present.

The idea of...

a ruler/god at war with itself

was interesting, but I felt like the first half of the book was just dragging out explaining it when it could have been done in the first chapter.