Jlawrence’s Comments (group member since Mar 08, 2010)

Jlawrence’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

I was 22 shy of my 2011 Goodreads Challenge goal of 60, and don't think I'll do that "reach this total" kind of challenge this year. I really like the suggestion here of making the 2012 goal a list of particular books you've been meaning to read. There's my goodreads' to-read shelf, of course, but I like the idea of prioritizing some from that mammoth grab-bag. So, for 2012:

The Neverending Story
Hyperion
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Name of the Rose
Paprika
In the Night Garden
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Sophie Scholl and the White Rose
Kaputt
Dubliners
Heir to the Empire
Neverness
Below the Root
Cloud Atlas
Garden, Ashes

I'm creating a '2012 Reading Challenge' goodreads shelf for these.

Ugh. I donated and sold several boxes of books last year but still have too many, and no remaining shelf space (from where I'm sitting there's a stack of books on a counter and another on a corner table to testify to this shelf-space-lack). I have been buying many more e-books on the kindle in the past year, too, which has helped with the problem, but I don't think I could do any big purge - maybe some small ones spaced out to ease the pain!

I loved the film as a kid and I remember reading somewhere that the author was pretty angry with the adaptation. Now this thread has enlightened me as to why! (And now I'm adding it to my Goodreads to-read).

Steve wrote: "Although The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was not well received, largely for its political opinions, when discussed on S&L, consider books by Robert A. Heinlein...

In more general terms, it slightly upsets me when people declare that they do not like a story because of it's religious opinion, political position and so forth because they disagree with it. It is FICTION people! The author can present any politics or religion that they darn-well want in their story. The reader should not determine that they then dislike the book because of that, but embrace its intent. Perhaps the author is describing a Christian/socialist ideal, or putting a positive spin on a communist future, not because they like the idea, but because they consider it necessary to their fiction."

Well, what I didn't like in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress wasn't necessarily the ideas themselves, but how they were presented by soapboaxing. The professor seemed too obviously a mouthpiece for the view Heinlein seemed sympathetic towards -- but even if Heinlein wasn't sympathetic to those ideas, the professor was nonetheless allowed to monologue at length and the few times he was challenged by other characters they brought up straw-man arguments that were easily dismissed, and the professor's official enemies were consistently presented as bureaucratic pin-heads and/or fools.

That's a good way to indicate with neon lights who the good guys and bad guys are, but it doesn't make for a very nuanced or interesting exploration of an idea. This was balanced some by the revolution on the moon not taking the exact the shape intended by the professor's ideology, so the book overall wasn't as simplistic a 'Moon Libertarianism Yay!' set-up as it seemed half-way through, but the earlier soapboaxing still kept me from enjoying it fully.

Contrast this with Frank Herbert's interest in political and religious ideas in the Dune series (I'm only talking *Frank*'s work - I haven't read his son's Dune books). There is no one idea that is presented as the right idea of how to best govern -- it is instead a continually open question explored in the books.

For instance, Paul is the messianic leader who frees Dune, right? Who could be a better good guy than that? Well in Dune itself he greatly fears the cult of personality building around him, as well of the religion-fueled violence ('the galactic jihad') the fundamentalist Fremen could unleash on the rest of galaxy in his name, and these and other problematic consequences of his rebellion are explored in the subsequent books. Likewise, Paul promises that Dune will be ecologically remade into a green, un-harsh world. Great, right? Except that this process is shown in the later books as sapping the strength of the Fremen culture and creating its own backlash and problems.

This kind of complex give-and-take of the *consequences* of political ideas and actions is a much richer experience than soapboaxing. That's the kind of give-and-take I think Heinlein got right in Moon by having the revolution sway a bit from the professor's ideals.

And, bringing it (somewhat) back to the topic at hand, I was similarly annoyed by the anti-Christian soapboaxing in The Mists of Avalon, even though I'm an agnostic. Again, it was multiple examples of characters giving obvious speeches seeming to telegraph the author's point of view, instead of the author taking the harder tack of *showing* the consequences of opposing ideas through events in the story (let's see Christian oppression instead of have Merlin monologue about it). Like Moon is a Harsh Mistress (but to a lesser degree), this was mitigated by some additional nuance in Mists' conclusion, but the soapboxing nonetheless diminished my enjoyment of the book.

Partially, this is related to the the old *show, don't tell* rule of writing good fiction.

I've had varying experiences revisiting teenage favorites.

Sometimes it's pretty painful - re-reading bits of Piers Anthony's science fiction and his Xanth series for example (...but, if I'm completely honest, some of the later books in that series even annoyed back then when they became a collection of bad puns barely strung together by a shoddy plot).

When I've re-read Harlan Ellison, I don't find his stuff bad, but kind of over-reaching for effect and not having the impact it did on me originally.

Some I've revisited are still quite good but I am more aware of where they are clunky - Dune and other Herbert books are like that for me now. Still strong and interesting but I will also find myself thinking "ah, here the Baron chortles and explains his plan like a cardboard-cut-out villain" (though (view spoiler)[he was much more interesting when he reappeared in Children of Dune (hide spoiler)]), "ah, here again two characters explain something they already both know intimately, purely for the benefit of the reader", etc.

A Wizard of Earthsea was an example that was just as solid upon the re-read as I had remembered.

There's many factors that go into the experience of reading something. Like others have said, the more I've read, the more I've been exposed to some really good writing both in genre and mainstream fiction, and that makes it harder to swallow poor or even mediocre writing -- often a big stumbling block when revisiting something that held a nostalgic glow in memory. And, like others have said, some of it is simply my tastes having changed.

Paul 'Pezski' wrote: "This is also a problem revisiting old, beloved TV shows."

Oh man, when I tried to re-watch Space:1999 episodes...

Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art, probably the best collection of science fiction art in one volume I've ever seen - really stunning and fun, with fascinating details about the artists' lives and the evolution of the medium.

Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, a fun read examining some of the main misconceptions about medieval times. Part of research I'm doing for a re-write of my NaNoWriMo hunk o' fantasy fiction.

This is first time in as long as I can remember that I'm not reading the S&L pick *or* the official alternate (shhhh! Don't tell T&V! ....ooops....)

I'm doing a run of Joan Didion's non-fiction in the collection We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live and enjoying her intelligence, precise language and dry humor immensely.

I chuckled out loud (COL!).

I set my challenge at 60 books for 2011, and am only at 37 currently. Besides real-life distractions, the main culprits of this failure were the slogging pace with which I read the lengthy Wise Man's Fear, Dance with Dragons, and Reamde (see, it's S&L's fault! ;) ) - plus NaNoWriMo, during which I barely read at all.

I do have a train-ride commute everyday to work, plus sometimes time on a city bus, and that's when I get the most of my reading done. I'm doing a run of shorter non-fiction titles now (Joan Didion currently) to recover from the doorstop milestones of the year. ;)

I work on a college campus and thoroughly exploit its libraries - I *love* the semester-long checkout times (a checked-out book can be recalled early by someone and then you have a week to return it, which I've both made use of and been a victim of).

However, I didn't even know about Overdrive for ebooks/audio books, and it looks like my local libraries do support it - I'll have to try that out, too.

Yeah, the ending was kind of disappointing, but that's how I felt about the book in general. I really liked the characters and the in-game and behind-the-scenes aspects of T'Rain, and for those aspects I'm glad I read it. But a lot of the whole chase/action-sequence plot held too many implausibilities to be immersive for me, and it was too long of a slog to work purely as a fun pot-boiler/adventure. (It wasn't just the length - Anathem and Cryptonomicon were both nearly as long, but I felt they justified their lengthinesses).

Nick wrote: "Stephenson has said he wanted to make the two parts of the book into two separate books but his publisher decided to keep the parts together."

That's very interesting. I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more that way.

For those of you for whom this was your first Stephenson, please give Snow Crash a try at some point - I probably like Reamde's characters more, but Snow Crash is much more imaginative and better paced (considerably shorter, too ;) ).

Meggie wrote: "I use my Goodreads "to-read" shelf differently. I use it for books the books that I gave up on or just got tired of reading at that point in time. I don't want them in the read or the currently reading list, but I like knowing what page I stopped on in case I pick them up again later"

Ah, I created a custom shelf for that: "abandoned but tempting". But I didn't track current page status before moving books onto it - I should start doing that.

Yeah, I throw things on my Goodreads to-read list fairly often (it's at 209 books). I probably should start tagging things "science fiction" "history" "won the '09 UltraIncredible Award", etc., but it's just a grab-bag currently. I do occasionally browse it see what'll grab me for a next read.

Micah wrote: "Golden Compass for sure too! That movie was all over the place. It tried so so hard and failed at everything."

A Golden Compass viewing at a San Francisco theater was, I think, the first attempt at a Sword & Laser meetup. Yes, such a disappointing adaptation.

I have to put Phantom Menace on my list. So excited to see it, such a WTF let-down.

The Grudge
Howard the Duck
Jaws 3-D (the 3D didn't even work for me - stupid shark! )
Batman and Robin

I used to always be reading five to six books at one time. Usually they'd be a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and a mix of genres, so they would stay separate in my mind (even reading two fantasy books with complex worlds at once would surely lead to inadvertent imaginary world-mash-ups and confusion for me).

But this habit meant a fair number of books I liked nevertheless got set aside as I plunged into some shiny new book. I recently have tried reading only two books at once, one fiction and one non-fiction, to reduce the "abandoned book" factor (I don't mind abandoning books I truly don't like, though). But restricting myself like that just seems to have slowed down my reading pace (or maybe it's just been some of the longer books S&L picks this year ;) ), and I may return to my 'too many things on one platter' method.

I liked Morrowind and Oblivion (especially with mods), and really got sucked into Fallout 3 (completed it, which I didn't with those other two). I've only scratched the surface of Skyrim because I had to deny myself it for NaNoWriMo, but even the little I've played makes me like it even more than those previous Bethesda open-world fests, even with the clumsy console-port UI since I'm playing on PC. I'm really looking forward to finally getting sucked into the Skyrim black hole... *disappears down a dragon's maw*

Just hit 50k earlier this evening! Yet the novel's not finished, and to tell the entire story I realized I'll need a trilogy. To make sure I continue work on it, my goal is to have a complete second draft by next August, so I can bring parts of it into next year's Dragon*Con writing workshops. NaNoWriMo was a painful but ultimately good experience.

I have stayed on target so far, but only by *forcing* myself to write the minimum each day, and not allowing myself to play games, watch movies, etc. unless I have. Thus, I have only played 3 hours of Skyrim despite having bought it on release day (o how I want to kill me some dragons).

Tom is right that the second week was the toughest so far, but it's still rough for me to make the daily minimum!

I think some of these machines could help us NaNoWriMo'ers, though:

Here be mine. Yesterday was the first day I didn't quite make my daily goal! Ack! Must make up the word lack tonight...

http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participa...

I definitely did. In fact, several friends and I joined Goodreads at the same time and there was a bit of a race between us to add and rate as many of the books we'd read as we could. I did it in chunks, basically go through my bookshelves. Now I occasionally remember something I've read before but haven't listed, and add it.

I like having as much as what I've read listed, it gives me a sense of the journey I've taken as a reader, makes me want to re-read certain titles, etc. And it certainly makes sense in terms of giving more input to the hive Goodreads rating for individual books.

Jenny wrote: "So I ran the stats. Number of books means nothing! Let's just take the last two years, shall we Sean? In 2010 up through today, you have read 59,268 pages. I have read 97,157 pages in that same amount of time. That means you have only read 61% of what I've read. I win!"

Sean has been GR-pwned! :D