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Comments
Is he trying to be funny or scary there? Because I'm really not sure.
Scary.
Dear goodness.
It's okay; the book isn't half as terrible as the author!
I think that he and the guys who made F.A.T.A.L. should hang out.
Or not.
Well, at least then they wouldn't be in two separate places to contaminate the rest of the world.
Just read Thomas Ligotti's "In the Shadow of Another World" for the first time in a while. It's an odd little number: Very stylised, with lots of references to nightmares and insane shadows and other such things, ending with one of those wry Twilight Zone-esque denouements that's less creepy than puzzling. Not his strongest outing by any means, but the descriptions of the setting are exquisite, and the climax is... trippy, for the lack of a better word. "All the world was a pageant of nightmares," indeed.
It's actually that very passage—wherein everything just goes blootie-hoo crazy—that inspired me to start writing the story I'm writing now. So I owe a certain debt to this little slice of atmosphere, even if the story as a whole is a bit underwhelming.
Dear God, I knew that Goodkind is a piece of shit, but I wasn't prepared for his writing to be that bad! Here I was thinking Lovecraft sucked at being scary, and he can actually write worth a damn!
If it didn't carry on for so many books (preemptive tl;dr, I guess?), I'd definitely try Sword of Truth. I mean, for the lol value. Plus, tell me if I'm wrong, wasn't it another of the series' unique features, the fact that the Evil Overlord was a communist dictator? You don't see it often in a fantasy novel. 8)
There are some evil commies in the third Mistborn book. They aren't the main villains though.
^^^ I always thought that Lovecraft's poetry was far more successful at getting across the emotions and ideas that he wanted to convey than his prose, but that's beside the point here: Even his most gormless climaxes are more unsettling than that thing.
>poetry
Come to think of it, my Lovecraft book doesn't have any poetry. I guess that's why it's part of a Tales collection. Either way, I have to admit that I'm curious now.
Here is the poem cycle Fungi from Yuggoth. The thirty-second poem, "Alienation", is perhaps my favourite of Lovecraft's works; setting aside the implied supernatural nature of the subject's condition, I can safely say that I have known that feeling, and thankfully only fleetingly.
I'm feeling an all-nighter coming on, so I might read through that once I read more of Snow Crash.
Speaking of which, I just finished Chapter 7. Ho-lee cow. This is great, right here.
I need to get around to reading more Stephenson.
My mom loved Snow Crash, but I haven't read it yet. I started and really enjoyed Anathem, but I never finished it and that's not even the same thing anyway...
Reading multiple Sanderson series really does improve them. For example, in Final Empire, Hoid just showed up, and knowing that he's a lot smarter than he's acting, I'm pretty sure he's trolling.
Nyktos's review is one of the best descriptions of Snow Crash I have ever seen. Diamond Age is a great read too, but it is, for a change, serious.
@ClockworkUniverse: Hoid is someone from Stormlight I assume? Who was he in Mistborn? (Someone I didn't attach any significance to at the time, obviously.)
Hoid is in everything Sanderson writes. He travels between universes...doing stuff. He seems like a good guy, especially in Stormlight, though it's kind of hard to tell with his whole mysterious agenda thing.
In Mistborn, he's Kelsier's informant right around the halfway point.
That actually would've been my guess, so either I'm a genius or I subconsciously remembered the name Hoid. Whichever.
I was really disappointed in Elantris when he showed up for like two sentences.
Was his appearance in Mistborn that much longer though?
Now I'm wondering if he showed up in the other two books and I didn't notice. I'm sure you'll point out if/when he does though.
No, but it was much more interesting. In Elantris he was pretty much just some guy. I mean, he helped the heroes, a little bit, but it wasn't really a big deal at all.
you are
So I just read a book called The Wounded Guardian, which is a fantasy novel (surprise surprise).
I was honestly expecting it to be pretty bad. A friend recommended it to me, and he's not always particularly discriminating when it comes to media consumption. The opening parts of the book didn't do much to alleviate my fears, with fantasy naming conventions all over the place, and some of the dialogue is pretty bad throughout (particularly the villain dialogue).
That said? I would consider this a good book. While it's the first of a three-parter and has geared itself up to be epic, civil war-based fantasy, it sticks remarkably close to what makes the characters relevant, and it often hit the sweet spot where a character makes a scenario relevant, but said scenario is explored in a way that makes it interesting in its own right at well.
What's unfortunate is the lack of imagination that went into many of the fantasy aspects. Like many fantasy novels, there's a map at the front, and it has to be the most boring one I've ever seen. Much of the plot revolves around the "Dragon Sword", which was given to a historical king by dragons and is super shiny and powerful and stuff. The exception here is magic, which I'm pretty sure would work like Full Metal Alchemist if a whole book was written from the perspective of a wizardly character. In essence, the magic in this setting is using scientific understanding and some abstract art of energy manipulation to do stuff. For instance, wizards use reproductive factors of oak trees to teleport around the world. It's pretty cool.
But yes, a good book. A great main duo of characters, pretty action-packed in a pleasing way and its faults don't significantly detract from its strengths.