Tony’s
Comments
(group member since Dec 19, 2018)
Tony’s
comments
from the Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy group.
Showing 221-240 of 1,069
Jannelies wrote: "Hamilton is among my favorites although I haven't read all of his books. This one is a hefty 900+ pages so it will keep me occupied for the next few weeks."900 pages? That's just a short story for Peter Hamilton 😝
I also enjoy his books, and the last one I read was also Great North Road.
It is possible to finish 20 books without completing any rows or columns - but you would probably have to plan it.
I have finished the 13th book counting towards this year's Bingo, so I am past the halfway point - still no columns or rows completed.
I have finished The Perfect Brew, which was a pretty unsurprising cozy mystery. It did feature a magical building, so it fills that slot in my Bingo.
I have finished reading The Witching Place: A Fatal Folio. This series starter is marketed as a cozy mystery, but that implies there will be some supernatural elements. While there are hints at such, really it's more of an Agatha Christie style murder mystery, although the heroine is more reminiscent of Inspector Clouseau than Miss Marple.
I have finished Spirit of Cahir Mullach: An Irish Ghost Story. It was enjoyable, without being exceptional.
I have started reading Spirit of Cahir Mullach: An Irish Ghost Story, which will fill the Ghost Story slot in my Bingo
I have finished Red Inferno: 1945, a solid alternate history of what might have happened had Stalin not been happy with the carve up of Germany agreed to in the Yalta Agreement, and decided to push for control of Europe.
I finished Ozma of Oz, continuing my readthrough of Complete Stories of Oz. The second and third books in the series haven't been at the quality of the original, but they've been ok.
I finished The Three. I had hoped to finish this before I flew off on my holiday to Thailand, but life got too hectic and I still had about a third to go - which I finished during the flight. It's not a horrible book, but it didn't seem to be able to make up its mind as to what it wanted to be, and that left it a bit disappointing.
Andrea wrote: "Even the first one, not just when he tied the Word & Void to Shannara, which was a twist I really liked and thought was neat, a high fantasy that is really a future urban fantasy with some SF stuff going on in the background."I read the Sword of Shannara when it first came out, so Word & Void hadn't been written at that point, and I'm not sure if Brooks was even planning on filling out that part of the history at that stage. And I was too outraged at how blatantly it had copied Lord of the Rings to pick up on any subtleties 😆Fortunately, the other books in the original trilogy showed more originality, and his Magic Kingdom series showed me that he was a talented author.
I lump dystopian and post-apocalyptic together on a Goodreads shelf, as they often have similar themes, but I do thing there is a difference between the two. My definition of dystopian matches the one you listed in the beginning of your post, Andrea. I think post-apocalyptic is a broader category, and a post-apocalyptic society doesn't have to be dystopian, or even unpleasant. Shannara could class as post-apocalyptic, but it doesn't really have that feel to it.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is an excellent book, and I would have placed it higher up the list. Although, I don't really think of it as dystopian, more post-apocalyptic. However, that may just be me being overly pedantic 😝
Interesting list. I'm not a huge reader of dystopian fiction, but I have read 17 on that list, and one of the honourable mentions (The Man in the High Castle). And I have another 8 or 9 on my TBR list. I have read all of the top 7 other than The Hunger Games.
I have finished The Beast of Wolfe's Bay, which was a fun graphic novel. It's essentially a retelling of Beowulf, but with plenty of pop culture references thrown in.I have started The Three, which will fill the Author New to Me slot in my Bingo.
