The Books/Reading Thread

[TechnicalBarbarity]

yea, i've heard a lot of complaints where people say he(Jordan) kept starting a bunch of new storylines without wrapping up old ones or something like that. But a lot of people also seem to say that it's basically the father of modern fantasy and the greatest thing the genre has to offer etc.

 

[The Ozzman]

The Eye of the World is great though.

Agreed. It's at least worth it to read that if nothing else. The prequel and second book are on my list but I don't feel like devoting that much time to it right now.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

more Elmore Leonard for me ...

Spoiler

... btw guys i have to come clean, my real name is Arlene and im a middle-aged woman from Texas.

 

[no country for old wainds]

nice, i really need to read some leonard myself.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

nice, i really need to read some leonard myself.

you've never read any of his stuff? I'm actually kind of surprised

 

[no country for old wainds]

i really should, man. everything i've seen based on leonard stuff is great: justified, jackie brown, 3:10 to yuma, out of sight.

 

[EternalMetal]

yea, i've heard a lot of complaints where people say he(Jordan) kept starting a bunch of new storylines without wrapping up old ones or something like that. But a lot of people also seem to say that it's basically the father of modern fantasy and the greatest thing the genre has to offer etc.

Its flawed in many ways, but overall I think it is worth it. Some of the characters can be maddening during their developments throughout the series, and some books move about at a snail's pace. In the end I'm glad I stuck through it and imo it deserves a spot as one of the greats. It is definitely one of those series where the book snobs just year it to shreds, so I understand your apprehension.

As for your older post about other fantasy, I think you will love The Black Company. The writing gets better as the series progresses, but is a pretty cool dark fantasy series. It kind of softens towards the end, but is still worth it. You would like this much more than wheel of time.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

.... i actually have an old beat up paperback of the first Black Company book. I'll probably get started on the LOTR trilogy tonight and take it form there.

i really should, man. everything i've seen based on leonard stuff is great: justified, jackie brown, 3:10 to yuma, out of sight.

yea Justified is what made me look into his stuff. I've been a huge 3:10 to Yuma fan but never knew it was based off of his writing. The guy was pretty damn prolific

 

[dwellerINTHEdark]

 

[Vegard Pompey]

I fucking love the first three Black Company books. The following eight are hit and miss. Would strongly recommend anyone to read those first three, they form a self-contained trilogy with a satisfying ending.

 

[Manic Ferocity]

First one was great.

 

[Einherjar86]

I love this book. My wife and I have read/listened to the first four in the series, and so far I like the first one the best; but they're all good to great. She combines mystery with these little flairs of folk horror in the first one, and it works so well.

Just started reading Iain Reid's I'm Thinking of Ending Things. It's part psychological thriller, part horror--twenty pages in, and it's already deeply unsettling.

 

[EternalMetal]

I fucking love the first three Black Company books. The following eight are hit and miss. Would strongly recommend anyone to read those first three, they form a self-contained trilogy with a satisfying ending.

First 3 are basically perfect, I agree with you there. After that shit gets kind of weird, the pacing can be inconsistent, and the god damn Nyueng Bao. Anything to do with the Nyueng Bao is boring as fuck, and Cook obsesses on them for quite a while. And in the meantime the dark grittiness of the early books gets kind of lost. Nevertheless I still enjoyed the entire series, just the latter half not as much.

 

[Vegard Pompey]

@TechnicalBarbarity I thought of something that might sell you on the Black Company books. The second book has a B-plot that is basically an Elmore Leonard-esque pulp crime story within a dark fantasy setting. It's a fantastic synthesis of genres and one of my favorite parts of the whole series. The first book can be a little slow, but the second one I found impossible to put down.

First 3 are basically perfect, I agree with you there. After that shit gets kind of weird, the pacing can be inconsistent, and the god damn Nyueng Bao. Anything to do with the Nyueng Bao is boring as fuck, and Cook obsesses on them for quite a while. And in the meantime the dark grittiness of the early books gets kind of lost. Nevertheless I still enjoyed the entire series, just the latter half not as much.

I would rank the books from best to worst like:

--god tier--
The White Rose
Shadows Linger
The Black Company
--pretty solid tier--
Soldiers Live
Shadow Games
Water Sleeps
Dreams of Steel
The Silver Spike
--meh tier--
She Is the Darkness
Port of Shadows
--took me like a fucking year to finish tier--
Bleak Seasons

Overall I think the series lost a little of its identity after the Books of the North trilogy. One thing I loved about those books was the obscurity of the setting; everything was named after English nouns and there wasn't an obvious real world-counterpart (aside from a skeleton of basic European medieval fantasy tropes) to any culture or location in the books, and it ran counter to traditional notions of "world-building" in fantasy by establishing its setting by withholding detail rather than inundating the reader with it. It made the entire setting of the series seem perpetually shrouded in fog, in an almost kafkaesque way. So when the Books of the South introduced more conventional world-building, and cultures with obvious real world-counterparts (Taglios = India, Nyueng Bao = Vietnamese, etc.) that sense of obscurity was lost. I still like many of the later books - Soldiers Live especially was a strong conclusion. But the first trilogy is the quintessential Black Company read.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

reading The Hammer Of Darkness

Spoiler

hammer of Darkness - Google Search

 

[Onder]

Forgive me, I'm going to nerd out for a minute--since Pynchon is my favorite post45 American writer and I'm excited to talk to someone else who's actually reading him (since a lot of people give up after CL49).

CL49, Vineland, and Bleeding Edge are Pynchon's shortest novels (BE might be longer than Inherent Vice, I can't recall off the top of my head). It's been a while since I read Vineland, but Bleeding Edge is kind of Pynchon-lite (and a rehash of CL49 in a lot of ways, like CL49 for the post-9/11 east coast). Still a good book though.

CL49 is phenomenal, although it's best understood (in my opinion) as a kind of bridge between what I think are Pynchon's two most significant novels: V. and Gravity's Rainbow. It's his shortest novel, but still has a lot going on, as you say. Lit critic Mark McGurl writes that CL49 miniaturizes Pynchon's "more typical sprawling maximalism," by which I take him to mean that CL49 manages to capture the historical breadth of Pynchon's longer novels in an impressively short space (the whole backstory with Trystero and The Courier's Tragedy channels a sense of deep--and secret--history).

You're going to get that "sprawling maximalism" with V. It's his debut novel (published in 1963), and it's a fucking wild ride. Not only is it physically chunky (some 500 plus pages), it's conceptually dense. It jumps around chronologically and can be tough to follow. In many ways, it feels more like a modernist novel (Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, or Orlando) than his later works. That said, there's still a mystery at the heart of it; but you occasionally have to be patient to get the juicy investigative parts (and they usually involve stories that take you back in time).

For me, CL49 feels like a kind of channel between V. and Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow. In fact, it feels more like a preface to GR than a standalone novel (although of course, it is a standalone work). I'll be really interested to hear what you think of V. I think you'll find it surprisingly different than CL49, Vineland, and BE, while still possessing plenty of Pynchon's identifying markers (there's a lot of humor and absurdity galore).

I finished reading V. yesterday, I will copy some random notes here:

The spy novel-like chapter taking place in Cairo and Alexandria, which is mostly a revised story from the Slow Learner which I've read, albeit in czech: The great thing about the rewrite is that the story of Porpentine and Goodfellow in V. is laid down from the perspective of various locals. It might omit some details from the original but it definitely showcases the writing abilities of Pynchon at that point. In Slow Learner it's "just a spy story", one that Pynchon himself is critical of, in V. it's something more. I think that instead of inserting his own characters into a place from a baedeker, he gave the locals their own histories to give the place a soul. It does make it a more demanding read though.

The Mondaugen's story from German South-West Africa was the most difficult for me to read, it was morbid, depressive, and psychedelic. Oh the other side, at least I know something about that period now that I was forced to google it, because honestly I had no idea about which were the German colonies in Africa and shit like that.

The whole Malta thing on the other hand kept reminding me of my short stay there on the Island (I was on Gozo specifically), I just had to reminisce about that. It's really a very poetic and mystical place. Gotta share some pictures later.

The trouble with this book is really the amount of characters and that I couldn't really emotionally connect to any. Profane's useless existence seemed fun, but I missed that one character that I could really connect with, V. is more like a mythical description of the world using a net of people who are all connected somehow. You have to let it flow and take you along. There was couple of times when I thought I will have to return to some of the passages to better understand, thinking I might have missed something, but in the end it all kind of clicked.

You correctly called it a "wide ride". I shall continue with Gravity's Rainbow now.

 

[Slayed Necros]

The Black Company was the first fantasy series I read. Made it through seven books before getting bored. Can't remember a whole lot but the first trilogy was definitely the best. I'm now on the seventh book of the Malazan series and it's clear Erikson was massively influenced by Cook, even if I think the former is a better writer overall.

 

[no country for old wainds]

most of the soldier/mercenary-related stuff in erikson is pure cook really, albeit recontextualised into something a lot grander obviously. cook is an erikson fan too which is cool. i bet cook is familiar with elmore leonard tbh, i know he loves mystery/detective novels as much as fantasy and always cites guys like raymond chandler as influences. i'm sure he reads all those hard ass military autobiographies as well, he was in the navy just before 'nam iirc and you can tell.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

i'm sure he reads all those hard ass military autobiographies as well, he was in the navy just before 'nam iirc and you can tell.

The guy wrote Wheel of Time also ahas a pretty interesting background. He was some badass chopper gunner or something if remember correctly.

I haven't read much crime or mystery, but isnt Elmore Leonard considered the godfather of that genre or something? I've heard plenty of people, articles, etc referring to him as one of the all time greats.

 

[Einherjar86]

I finished reading V. yesterday, I will copy some random notes here:

The spy novel-like chapter taking place in Cairo and Alexandria, which is mostly a revised story from the Slow Learner which I've read, albeit in czech: The great thing about the rewrite is that the story of Porpentine and Goodfellow in V. is laid down from the perspective of various locals. It might omit some details from the original but it definitely showcases the writing abilities of Pynchon at that point. In Slow Learner it's "just a spy story", one that Pynchon himself is critical of, in V. it's something more. I think that instead of inserting his own characters into a place from a baedeker, he gave the locals their own histories to give the place a soul. It does make it a more demanding read though.

The Mondaugen's story from German South-West Africa was the most difficult for me to read, it was morbid, depressive, and psychedelic. Oh the other side, at least I know something about that period now that I was forced to google it, because honestly I had no idea about which were the German colonies in Africa and shit like that.

The whole Malta thing on the other hand kept reminding me of my short stay there on the Island (I was on Gozo specifically), I just had to reminisce about that. It's really a very poetic and mystical place. Gotta share some pictures later.

The trouble with this book is really the amount of characters and that I couldn't really emotionally connect to any. Profane's useless existence seemed fun, but I missed that one character that I could really connect with, V. is more like a mythical description of the world using a net of people who are all connected somehow. You have to let it flow and take you along. There was couple of times when I thought I will have to return to some of the passages to better understand, thinking I might have missed something, but in the end it all kind of clicked.

You correctly called it a "wide ride". I shall continue with Gravity's Rainbow now.

Yeah, it's insane. If you disliked some of the characterization (or lack thereof), you won't find much better in Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon is often criticized for being shallow on character. I've never been particularly partial to character development, which I think is one of the reasons I'm drawn to his work.

My absolute favorite chapters in V. are "She Hangs on the Western Wall" and "Confessions of Fausto Maijstral." I go back and re-read just those chapters. They're so good.