John's recent posts

Recent public posts (showing 161-180 of 186).

Just finished White Night by Jim Butcher and trying to decide whether to buy the newest in the series, which just came out in hardback. Reading Childhood's End for the discussion. Outside our genres, I'm still plugging away at Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, slowly but surely. For classes I teach, I'm re-reading Catch-22 and about to start Cat's Cradle. Before the month's over, I'll be reading Taming of the Shrew for the same reason.

I guess I was part of the narrow, high level appeal, because I loved American Gods but indifferent enough to Neverwhere that I'm not re-reading it this month. I would have to disagree with Sandikal's assessment of it as style-over-substance. Granted that I haven't read everything Gaiman's written, but I found it to be the most substantive of his books.

Incidentally, my understanding of this list was not as suggestions for discussion books, or at least not necessarily for discussion books, but just in general "here's good fantasy I've read that I would recommend to others."

Except that I haven't read Stardust</>, Rob could have written my post for me. It's been a few years since I read Neverwhere and at the moment I'm not planning on re-reading it. I loved American Gods and while I found this one enjoyable, it didn't grab me nearly as much.

That said, the friend who introduced me to Gaiman's work felt exactly the opposite about these two books.

I can only speak for myself here, Kathryn, but the books I recommended are adult fantasy.

Something occurred to me as I was writing my list: namely, that such a list doesn't seem very useful, at least as it stands. In part, it's an issue of credibility: what's the value of any particular recommendation? Take my own: for all any of you know, those might be the only nine authors I've ever read, so my basis for making recommendations might be poor (I promise it isn't... but what's that promise worth on-line?). If we happen to know some of the books being recommended, that helps, of course. "Oh yes, I liked X and Y too, so maybe I'd also like her recommendation of Z."

Second, there's the issue of taste. Fantasy is a wide genre with a dizzying array of subgenres. For my part, I would have a hard time classifying, off the top of my head, every genre I like. Let's say that I love epic fantasy (which I do). If you hate epic fantasy, finding it pretentious and long-winded, my recommendations are probably useless, and you have no way of knowing that without doing additional research or going and finding the book on some shelves, seeing that each volume by the writer is over a thousand pages long, and deciding to pass.

And just to add another wrinkle, there's also an issue of politeness: while most of us are quite willing to second someone else's recommendation, very few of us are going to say "You liked X? I thought it was awful." Maybe in a discussion of a particular book, but in a forum where people are telling us some of their favorite books? Probably not.

So is there some way we could make this more useful? A mini-review as some here have already done? A clear statement of what kinds of things we like along with our list? Or are folks pretty happy with things the way they are?

Some of these will be seconding someone else's recommendation...

A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin and the rest of the series A Song of Ice and Fire
The Gardens of the Moon by [Steven Erikson:] and the rest of the series The Malazan Book of the Fallen (the first book is pretty good, but the series gets better as it goes on
Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb and the rest of the Farseer Trilogy as well as the other trilogies set in the same world.
Jhereg by Steven Brust and the rest of the Taltos series.
Agyar by Steven Brust (it's not part of a series!)
The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Baker and the rest of The Prince of Nothing Series
The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny (this collects the whole series--individual books are no longer in print)
Storm Front by Jim Butcher and the rest of The Dresden Files
Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey (haven't read the rest of the series, but the first book was really good)

I'm definitely in the "one after another" camp. I want to have the whole thing in mind, at least as much as it is possible with a series of novels. That is to say, I almost certainly won't be able to read a single volume in one sitting, much less the whole series, but that's the ideal.

I'm on Spring Break, so I'm getting more reading done than I usually would. I'm plowing through Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. Also reading Plan B 3.0 by Lester Brown, which is a fascinating and frightening (and, I hope, by the end, hopeful) book about the converging catastrophes of the 21st century. It was available free in pdf form from his website, but a quick glance there didn't see it right off: http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/in...

Robert said:

I kept wondering though how the burbclave could have been so different! Did he make a wrong turn somewhere, was it a newer burbclave with updated features? Or was it just old fashioned individual home owners updating their houses?

It may have been any of these, but I also wonder if it wasn't a subtle suggestion from Stephenson that Hiro isn't the badass he thinks he is. He thinks of himself as a master of pizza delivery, but is he really? Here's my take: like some of the other characters, Hiro seems to have named himself. He sees himself as a hero, as a badass, as the protagonist of whatever story is going on (and he gives the name some Japanese flavoring both for cultural reason and because the samurai is the particular sort of badass-ness to which he aspires). This is who he wants to be.

And in the Metaverse, he is. He's the best sword-fighter ever there because he's one of the best programmers. He knew enough about sword fighting to write the code that even makes sword fighting possible, but as a hacker he's much more able to make his virtual self as cool as he wants to be, and this is true beyond just sword fighting.

We see a hint of the contrast in "real life" after his encounter with Raven, from the way that he starts to work harder practicing to the realization that he's never actually killed anyone in the real world until he does, to the chapter that starts off "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest..." etc.

From Hiro's perspective, Snow Crash is a story of working to become the hero in real life that he's styled himself as in the metaverse.

Anyway, that's my take on it.

I think Cliff hit the nail on the head. It's a thought-experiment taken to an extreme. But then, just look at Blackwater and wonder just how far from this extreme we are.

I think some of these things are also happening more subtly, though, the way that we've commercialized everything. I know that it's by no means the norm for religious people, but look how big of a following the show-biz-like mega-churches have. They seem more like they're about selling a product called Jeeesus than they are about real religion. Just show up and pay the entrance fee and be saved!

I read Neuromancer some time ago and I remember it as being hard to get into. Maybe Snow Crash was so much easier just because I'm older now. The genre lends itself well to social commentary, I think, because it's so close to the present, though in some cases that could also make it seem dated very quickly. I thought Snow Crash, at least, wore well.

I've been plugging away on this book in my free time for the past couple weeks, carefully trying to avoid the discussions, and I've finally finished. I enjoyed it a great deal from start to finish. I was hooked from the beginning--it's like any sf or fantasy, you have to jack up your ability to infer what strange terms mean or just put them into abeyance--"they'll make sense eventually."

Travis, re: Y.T. & Raven, I didn't find it all that unbelievable. She may have a hard candy shell, but she's also a 15-year-old girl. When she first meets Hiro, we see her getting gooey over him too. Given her character as portrayed, it didn't seem like a stretch that she would fall for the baddest mf in the world. Anyway, it's shown as an entirely momentary thing--by the end he's more smitten with her than she is with him.

Elizabeth, I'm curious to hear what's on the syllabus for that class. I'm an English teacher and sometimes have the opportunity to teach electives, but I always thought fantasy would be difficult to do simply because so much fantasy tends to be part of a huge series. So do you take the class time to read an entire series? Read a single book from the series? Only read stand-alone works?

I was interested in the premise of this list. As an English teacher in the independent school world, I have a lot of flexibility in what I teach (for instance, no problem pulling in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light to go with Herman Hesse's Siddhartha), and I've been thinking seriously about using more science fiction. One of the big advantages from a teaching standpoint is that these books aren't typically taught, so they aren't covered by sites like SparkNotes and the like, so kids are actually forced to engage with the text rather than taking shortcuts.

Anyway, it's a shame that this list seems so flawed. We've already sort of started doing this in our reactions to books that were left off, but I wonder if we might start putting together our own list of books that fit the criteria set forth, not just as a list as many have started to do, but also with a note about each selection you would make, why it deserves inclusion in such a list.

Any such exercise can't help but be subjective, but I think we've got a pretty bright group here and could probably come up with a decent list.

Kristjan, I'm fairly sure I'm a minority in this, but I liked Speaker for the Dead even better than Ender's Game.

I'm currently reading:

A Feast for Crows - George R. R. Martin (almost done, bummed that the series isn't finished)
Walden - Henry David Thoreau (teaching it to juniors right now)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (teaching it to sophomores right now)
Regeneration - Pat Barker (teaching it to seniors!)
The American Classics - Denis Donaghue (it's been lingering with only occasional bursts of reading actually getting done)
Plan B 3.0 - Lester Brown (making my way slowly)

Since you also like fantasy, you might enjoy two of Steven Brust's series. The first is a 2-book series comprised of The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After; they're set in the same world as his Taltos series, but stylistically they are much different: a sort of homage to Dumas (Phoenix Guards bears similarities to The Three Mustketeers, while Five Hundred Years After is titled after Dumas' Twenty Years After). This is followed by a series called The Viscount of Adrilankha. All of the aforementioned books are in a sort of faux-19th-century style that is rather fun once you get used to it.

Oh thank goodness. I was about to foolishly volunteer if no one else would. I say foolishly because my June will be spent 1) getting ready to move 2) moving from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania and 3) getting ready for my July wedding. I have no business leading any discussions in June. :)

I'll do my best to contribute to the conversation though! I just started reading the series at the beginning of the year (I'm reading the 4th book now) and I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Nick, I'll offer myself out there as well to discuss teaching English. I've spent the last 2 years teaching English (grades 10-12) full time and the five years before that teaching English part-time (11th grade). My experience is in private schools, so that certainly colors what I do to some extent, but ultimately teaching English is teaching English.

Other John, it's funny you should say that, because for the first few pages, I rather liked the style, but I guess I liked it as an appetizer, and when it came down to it I wanted something meatier to sink my teeth into.

But then, I like "big, thick fantasy novels."

Tim, I'm curious to get deeper into your comment about having trouble relating to characters/storylines in fantasy novels. I don't want to derail the conversation too much here, but I wonder if you could expand on it. What have you read where that was the case? Can you speculate on why that is? Just curious.

I think the only other work of hers that I've read was a short story, something like "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." That had very much a feel of a parable, but as short fiction, I felt like the style really worked there.