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What are you reading? (April 2014)

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B

Bandit1

Member
Someone posted this earlier and it looked right up my alley.

513qBrLNPlL.jpg


Came in the mail today but I don't know when I'll get to it.
 
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
This is why you come here for recs, instead of GoodReads.

Anyway as far as I an tell there isn't any ACTUAL bestiality, it's just homoerotica with animal motifs.
 
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
I think this one is the best: "Texas Longhorn Surprise (Kontra's Menagerie, # 13)"

Porniest/trashiest title f'real.
 
P

Polishin8r

Member
finished the forever war by J. Haldeman

what an awesome book .
i heard the next 2 books are disappointing and I think the boosk ending is just perfect. But damn what an awesome mix of Brave New World and star trek. Its nuts how the book manages to cover social/economical aspect of war, personal effect on him and other people and even manages to put in time travel (with time dilation) and even a romance story facking bravo this shit was just crack.
I heard Armor is also a good scifi/war book but i need to mix it up next with The road :)
 
L

Lumiere

Neo Member
aidan said:
The 2013 Hugo Award nominations are live (including some head scratching choice in the fiction categories, and this GAFfer in the non-fiction categories).
Click to expand...
Congratulations on the nomination! :)

I don't really like the idea of nominating the whole Wheel of Time series for best novel. :/
Given the list of nominees, hope best novel goes to Ancillary Justice (which is getting nominated for pretty much everything this year, isn't it?). I'm also a bit surprised to not see Gaiman in there.
 
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang (Subterranean Press Magazine, Fall 2013)
Click to expand...
lol. Everything Ted Chiang writes is like Hugo bait.
 
A

aidan

Hugo Award Winning Author and Editor
Lumiere said:
Congratulations on the nomination! :)

I don't really like the idea of nominating the whole Wheel of Time series for best novel. :/
Given the list of nominees, hope best novel goes to Ancillary Justice (which is getting nominated for pretty much everything this year, isn't it?). I'm also a bit surprised to not see Gaiman in there.
Click to expand...

Thanks!

I believe that Gaiman declined a nomination for The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
 
C

Clegg

Member
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good low medieval fantasy novel? Or just a book set in medieval times even?
 
L

Lumiere

Neo Member
aidan said:
Thanks!

I believe that Gaiman declined a nomination for The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Click to expand...
Oh, I had no idea! Did a bit of searching and it sounds like it's because of the twitter backlash on Jonathan Ross? I also didn't know that he had already declined a nomination for Anansi Boys before.
 
A

aidan

Hugo Award Winning Author and Editor
Cyan said:
Whoa! Congrats Aidan, that's awesome! Might be a tough category to win, but even the nomination is a great achievement. :)
Click to expand...

Thanks, Cyan. A surprise, and an honour. Definitely a tough category to win. I'm terribly excited to be nominated alongside two of my favourite websites: Pornokitsch and The Book Smugglers.
 
F

fakefaker

Member
Dr. Benton Quest said:
My girlfriend and I just finished this



We need something else to read together. Any recommendations? We'd like a fanatsy/adventure that's self contained (not part of a series).
Click to expand...

I might be off base here, but you might enjoy The Poppet and the Lune by Madeline Claire Franklin. It's more fairy tale than fantasy, but really really well done.

12043646.jpg
 
J

Jintor

Member
Clegg said:
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good low medieval fantasy novel? Or just a book set in medieval times even?
Click to expand...

Anything more specific? I've been reading more low fantasy these days, but more along the crime-fantasy genre than anything.
 
C

Clegg

Member
Jintor said:
Anything more specific? I've been reading more low fantasy these days, but more along the crime-fantasy genre than anything.
Click to expand...
I was thinking along the lines of Locke Lamora, but then I remembered that's more Renaissance low fantasy. ASOIAF is also low fantasy but probably grittier than what I'm looking for.

Really I'm just looking for a light hearted romp ala Locke Lamora.
 
J

Jintor

Member
Discworld is probably the highest-quality comedic fantasy I know. It's kinda funny because it's a high fantasy setting but all the stories themselves are pretty low fantasy (well, maybe not the first few).

But you've probably already read it... hmmmm...
 
C

Clegg

Member
Jintor said:
Discworld is probably the highest-quality comedic fantasy I know. It's kinda funny because it's a high fantasy setting but all the stories themselves are pretty low fantasy (well, maybe not the first few).

But you've probably already read it... hmmmm...
Click to expand...
I've read a lot of them but thanks for the suggestion. Looking for one is harder than I thought tbh.
 
J

Jintor

Member
Most fantasy I know is earnestly self-serious :<

The only other comedic one that jumps to mind is whatever series Forward the Mage is in (Eric Flint?) and I'm preeeeeeeeetty sure that's more of a philosophical gag novel than a fantasy one (and it's definitely not low fantasy)
 
T

thomaser

Member
Not that it means much, but The Bookdepository just published their choice of the 100 best books ever written. I think it's an interesting list with a few controversial choices, many obvious omissions and several books I have never even heard of.

In no particular ranking (the ones I've read with an asterisk):
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night
- Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights*
- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice*
- Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend
- Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany's
- Roald Dahl: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Stories
- Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary*
- Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray*
- Homer: The Iliad*
- Leo Tolstoy: Resurrection
- Joseph Heller: Catch-22*
- Ernest Hemingway: Fiesta
- Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front
- Miguel Cervantes: Don Quixote*
- Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle
- George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia
- Ursula Le Guin: The Earthsea Quartet
- Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5*
- Philip Pullman: Grimm Tales
- Angela Carter: The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
- Martin Amis: Money
- P. G. Wodehouse: Carry on, Jeeves
- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein*
- Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451*
- John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath*
- Ann Patchett: Bel Canto
- Stephen King: It
- George Eliot: Middlemarch
- Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle*
- Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient
- Markus Zusak: The Book Thief
- Emile Zola: Therese Raquin
- Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead
- Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop
- Philip Pullman: Northern Lights
- Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
- Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca*
- J. D. Salinger: Franny and Zooey
- Georges Bataille: Story of the Eye
- Paul Céline: Journey to the End of the Night
- Lewis Carrol: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
- Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy
- Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children*
- Gabriel García Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude*
- Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita*
- Donna Tartt: The Secret History
- Alice Walker: The Color Purple
- Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
- Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance
- Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness*
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince*
- John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces*
- Victor Hugo: Les Miserables
- Honoré de Balzac: Lost Illusions
- Stendhal: The Red and the Black*
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Idiot*
- Anton Chekov: Stories
- Plato: Republic
- Henry David Thoreau: Walden
- Albert Camus: The Stranger*
- James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Sigmund Freud: The Unconscious
- Karl Marz: The Grundrisse
- Nicolo Machiavelli: The Prince
- Herman Melville: Moby Dick*
- Sun Tzu: The Art of War*
- John Green: The Fault in our Stars
- Carl Jung: Man and His Symbols
- Voltaire: Candide, or Optimism*
- Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species
- Robert A. Caro: The Path to Power
- Goethe: Faust, Part 1*
- Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- Toni Morrison: Beloved*
- John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany
- James Baldwin: Another Country
- Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- Jaroslav Hasek: The Good Soldier Svejk*
- Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis*
- Samuel Beckett: Watt
- Jack London: The Call of the Wild
- Raymond Chandler: The Long Goodbye
- William Styron: Sophie's Choice
- Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin
- Art Spiegelman: The Complete Maus
- Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
- Robert Hughes: The Shock of the New
- James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
- Edward Said: Orientalism
- Hannah Arendt: Eichman in Jerusalem
- John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society
- Barbara W. Tuchman: A Distant Mirror
- Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
- Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
- Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
 
C

Clegg

Member
Jintor said:
Most fantasy I know is earnestly self-serious :<

The only other comedic one that jumps to mind is whatever series Forward the Mage is in (Eric Flint?) and I'm preeeeeeeeetty sure that's more of a philosophical gag novel than a fantasy one (and it's definitely not low fantasy)
Click to expand...
I'll keep looking.

Thanks for the suggestions tho!
 
P

Piecake

Member
thomaser said:
Not that it means much, but The Bookdepository just published their choice of the 100 best books ever written. I think it's an interesting list with a few controversial choices, many obvious omissions and several books I have never even heard of.
Click to expand...

Well, at least its infinitely better than the websites that do reader choices of the best books ever. All you ever end up then is a bunch of Libertarian books.

Personally, I think lists like these are pretty much useless. I think anyone would be much better off taking recommendations from someone you know has similar tastes than a gigantic book list.
 
D

DirtRiver

Member
aidan said:
The 2013 Hugo Award nominations are live (including some head scratching choice in the fiction categories, and this GAFfer in the non-fiction categories).
Click to expand...

Wait, you're the guy behind A Dribble Of Ink? What an incredible coincidence, I found out about your site last month and absolutely adore it.

Congratulations on the nomination!

I'm reading Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

104089.jpg


Definitely enjoying the book, although there are times I wish Kay would continue with the action instead of meadering a bit with his prose. Still, the characterization is incredible - something I was expecting from what other's were saying about Kay - and the plotting has been excelent so far.
 
N

NeoGiff

Member
78hEnAY.jpg


The 11th book in the series. Lorn is probably my favourite protagonist so far (with Cerryl and Justen coming pretty close).
 
K

KidDork

Member


Reading Mistborn. A fun book, with a cool magic system and interesting world. I guess everyone says that, but it kinda fits. I'm surprised this isn't a RPG yet.

Edit: Oh, wait. There is one. No surprise. Some of the book does feel a bit like a game tutorial.
 
A

AngmarsKing701

Member
Polishin8r said:
finished the forever war by J. Haldeman

what an awesome book .
i heard the next 2 books are disappointing and I think the boosk ending is just perfect. But damn what an awesome mix of Brave New World and star trek. Its nuts how the book manages to cover social/economical aspect of war, personal effect on him and other people and even manages to put in time travel (with time dilation) and even a romance story facking bravo this shit was just crack.
I heard Armor is also a good scifi/war book but i need to mix it up next with The road :)
Click to expand...

Armor and The Road are both excellent

aidan said:
The 2013 Hugo Award nominations are live (including some head scratching choice in the fiction categories, and this GAFfer in the non-fiction categories).
Click to expand...

Congrats! What an awesome achievement!

Clegg said:
I've read a lot of them but thanks for the suggestion. Looking for one is harder than I thought tbh.
Click to expand...
Abercrombie is very gritty. Start with The First Law trilogy.
 
W

Wafflecakes

Member
KidDork said:


Reading Mistborn. A fun book, with a cool magic system and interesting world. I guess everyone says that, but it kinda fits. I'm surprised this isn't a RPG yet.

Edit: Oh, wait. There is one. No surprise. Some of the book does feel a bit like a game tutorial.
Click to expand...
Love that series. Blew my mind the first time I read it.

I reread it this year and didn't like it as much though.
 
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