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So far, I've read two thirds of the Powder Mage Trilogy, which was written by one of his proteges, and - frankly, it's good adventure writing, but not much more to me. I'd take it for a train ride, but hardly call it a classic. Worldbuilding is average, characters are rather generic and their motivations relatively bland, and even magic seems to be based on a single good concept liberally mixed with the desire to provide characters with a bunch of cool powers.
I'm probably sounding harsh, but in truth I actually enjoyed this series, the good parts are just not relevant to the topic I wanted to bring up.
Like, I am of that opinion that applying hard sci-fi mentality to fantasy means doing it wrong. Go too far that road and it becomes some sort of speculative sci-fi, like Flatland. I feel like nerds are ruining fantasy by applying their autistic ways, honed by years of D&D and MMORPGs, to something that is best approached differently.
Now, now, guys, put down those pitchforks, that is merely my impression. My personal taste in fantasy seems to be at odds with a major trend within the genre. I think I can see the appeal of it, but, it just conflicts so much with my notion of what fantasy is. (Perhaps I'm as autistic as the nerds, but focus on different issues.)
And now I feel like I defeated my own argument, perhaps for the better. Anyways, I am curious about sampling thys style of fantasy for myself and seeing on the basis of its best how much will it influence my concerns.
Having said that, there's one more issue I want to raise.
Like, in recent years there seems to have arisen a counter-trend to this one, which appears to be spearheaded by "ethnic" writers. I don't really follow global fantasy literature too closely, but there's been a bunch of not really WASPy names growing to prominence, and some of them openly challenged Sanderson's precepts. And, well, I'll put it this way: since they're not white, or not male, or not straight etc. etc., they have the edge in the debate. They can present their style as not just an aesthetic choice, but also one stemming from some sort of minority viewpoint. This seems to be in the air even though they don't bludgeon anyone with it. (I know of no cases of Sanderson's style accused of being too western or something, fortunately.) So, this seems to be the direction fantasy fiction will follow for a while.
I only read YA, mom books and occassionally sci-fi, so I'm of no help here.
Oh yeah this reminds me, at one point I thought Little Fires Everywhere could be the next American Classic, but in this same thought I also realized it felt like I was reading something that had been processed through an algorithm to create the Great American Novel. Having read more, I'm erring very close to the latter.
Well, probably. I mean people who read high fantasy complain heavily when magic systems are basic so the audience gets what it
wantsdeserves.At a lot of points, I was merely told what to feel, rather than allowed to think for myself. At one point, exactly one I think, there was an actual question in the prose, and it was oddly jarring.
This book operates in like, reality, but hyper-reality, so feelings trump logic and such. However, there were points where this failed to work. The whole ending is very quick, and everybody's emotions kind of are wrapped up very conveniently except for Izzy's. Pearl is practically nonchalant as her whole life changes forever, with Mrs. Richardson seemingly more concerned about the facts of Pearl's conception than she is.
In fact, the last part, throughout the ending, feels very gluggly. The book so far was cynical and insane, featuring inept people whose actions speak volumes and tip the balance of life the wrong way. However, in the ending, everything seems to be in a dream state.
Mia, who is a surrogate-child-stealing tragic figure stuck in a permanent kidnapping, is presented as an Oprah like Mary Poppins who can see into people's souls, a feature not actually even present in her art at any point before this. Even so, her Goop-era Gywneth Paltrow abilities achieve nothing.
Then we come to Izzy, who quickly graduates from being a bit angry and slight instances of assault to a long, drawn out premeditated arson. By the end of the book, when Izzy has run away from home, her mother has forgiven her, and believes this is what Freedom looks like. I'd have assumed she'd be more afraid of what her fear created in her daughter, rather than looking at her destroyed home with what is essentially awe.
Also, it's hilarious that the subplot; that Bebe's baby is taken in by the McCollough family after she abandons it at a fire station, but now she wants it back, is so irrelevant that it barely factors into talking about the book.
Anyways, the big notes.
it turns out Mia went to art school in NY but her parents wouldn't pay for it because they thought art school was dumb so she became a surrogate for her almost doppelganger but when she went home after her brother died her parents were like [esplodes] so she ran off with the baby and has been on the run Pearl's entire life.
Mrs.Richardson, Elena (the purported main character, who is in the book for like not that much, in fact all the teenagers collectively were the real main characters of this book which I liked) finds this out and when she finds out her son Trip is dating Pearl and accidentally thinks Pearl had an abortion (it was her own daughter Lexie who underwent the procedure under Pearl's name) she kicks Mia out of the house Elena was renting to her.
Izzy, her last born problem child basically insane daughter, takes this so personally that she lights a fire on each of her sibling's beds (hence the title). She also lights one outside her parent's bedroom, not knowing her mother is inside, though her mother escapes unscathed.
So she burns their whole house down and runs away from home to look for Mia so she can be Mia's surrogate daughter. Fin.
Quite the wacky plot, this book.
Also, I feel like that super angry MS Paint meme guy just thinking about the casting of the teenagers.
Unlike other reviewers, who apparently cannot stand the existence of Kerry-Washington-as-Mia. I mean, I don't think this Mia is the one from the book at all, so I think that's colored my perception of her. I don't see her as a bad actress, I see her as a phony photocopy of a faulty fax of the character from the book.
https://www.springernature.com/gp/librarians/news-events/all-news-articles/industry-news-initiatives/free-access-to-textbooks-for-institutions-affected-by-coronaviru/17855960
https://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type="Book"&package=mat-covid19_textbooks&facet-language="En"&sortOrder=newestFirst&showAll=true
tl;dr free books
I've just finished up the first half, or "Part One". I really dislike books that think distinctions like this matter when they're within the same binding and there's no real distinction between the parts aside from plot progression. It's dumb.
It did at least remind me not to scarf it all down in one sitting.
This book isn't really a "sequel", because it's set in the same universe but is about a whole other set of characters. Since the day I saw that this book would be coming out, I had a feeling that it was because the author was trying to recapture her glory days of times past.
Her last novel, Two Can Keep a Secret, quite literally stole it's whole design aesthetic (and naming convention) from her first. As far as I can tell, it was nowhere near as successful, and even I didn't care enough to read it.
By releasing a sequel, she and her publisher can force everybody who read the first book to be mildly interested, and then convert a lot of that into sales.
Anyways, this book's premise is much less stable than the first's, and the latest twist genuinely involves amnesia, which is just sad.
I think, after this, I'll probably institute a policy where I only read books from before 2015 so I can skip the inevitable part where straight white men are quite explicitly blamed for all of society's ills. In this book, it was to a seventeen year old's face, whilst he'd done nothing wrong at all. Frankly, it was (very light) racism right to his face, but whatever. It's YA, after all.
Funnily enough, the retort came from a non-white character who had no personality and existed entirely just to get this dig in and then immediately disappear.
I don't think YA authors actually care about all of this hullabaloo as much as they claim, and (clearly) neither do readers. I certainly don't want it in YA books at all, so that counts as caring in a way.
Otherwise, there's no way they would be getting away with complaining about gender stereotypes when the character complaining is is constantly reminding us that the only straight white male protagonist is worth caring for because he "might be hot someday". Especially in a book where "worthy male" seems to be code for "should have really really big muscles".
I'm not complaining about the concept, I mean, I certainly don't think I'd want to read much about the protagonists being in love with guys who aren't hot*. The book, however, is.
*Wow there are a lot of potholes I could've stepped into with this sentence, this one is the one I'm most comfortable with.
And another thing; there's actually a lot of venom directed at jocks and other sportsball types in this book. I know nerdy kids are the sorts who tend to read, but this book is about how the protagonists are mistreated and get a lot of flack when their secrets are exposed, and so people should be more understanding. So it's weird that they aren't.
Or, maybe, this book is genuinely about how constant human hypocrisy will never end and therefore showing us by how it too is extremely hypocritical!
Prolly not.
I think, for a book that kept me quite enthralled, I should have been more positive. Anyways, it's YA, so of course I quite like it even with the plodding plot and absolutely nonsensical inclusion of the main characters from the first book, who all stand out like sore thumbs whenever they show up.
To reiterate; it's a pretty fun book.
When I was younger, I was always amazed when people could figure out the various twists in a book. In this book, I figured out the whole plot about 300/375 pages in. Of course, I didn't figure out the final twist, which was irrelevant, extremely out of left field and stupid.
But, having figured it out, I realized exactly why the rest of the book had basically been characters going "I could find something out now but I'm going to wait till the chapter is over instead". Plus why there was amnesia. It needed to be padded out.
I think the book was engaging to an extent, but it's not worth much.
In other news, due to corona-related (but not exactly caused) circumstances I have barely read a paper book since, like, months. I was beginning to get concerned, but then I realized I spent that time (among other things) reading books on my computer. I read Lest Darkness Fall, which is rather naive by modern standards, but charming and influential ime travel story, and Imagined Communities, which is a book on the beginnings and development of nationalism. The latter is particularly an interesting read. Read the former if you have a mind for the classics of the genre, and in particular if you also have The Man Who Came Early by P. Anderson at hand. Anderson's like a Socratic gadfly of old-timey SF, poking holes in bloated egos of hard SF writers of his time.
Anyway, I have a stack of paper books next to me every day but I keep on not getting around to reading any of them because I keep on having stuff to do on my computer that's more urgent and/or easily accessible as opposed to "I have to commit to this larger task".
And I just end up kicking myself.
Even the sorts of names you can call somebody using explicit language don't convey what other similar words could.
So, thanks Superbad. You blazed the way, which ended up being paved over for use by middling YA authors.
When you write sad emo break-up diaries but you're Johann Wolfgang von Goethe so 300 years later some copywriter has to make you look good.
Now we can talk freely.
GlennMagusHarvey
Quote
Stormtroper
So, that might be the matter of me selecting the sources to suit the thesis. In this case, let's assume there is a minor genre of alien abduction horror and that's what I speak of. (Or something like that, I guess? lol idunno)
So, yeah, it seems to me that even when the horror seems to be about bad men doing bad things to you that make you feel sad, in the end, it's about not mattering to them. Like, even if Earth or life does matter overall, it doesn't in comparison to the aliens. Compare Cthulhu. He might not matter anymore than we do in the grand scheme, but in the, shall we say, slightly less grand he will still wake up and make us go crazy. The UFO folks might be subject to the same laws of biology, but have such a massive head-start to us, that it's, like, all the same.
Also, it's been pointed out on the topic of Lovecraftiana that as much as Earth was supposed to be a not-mattering-at-all random piece of rock, it seems to draw quite a lot of extradimensional entities. (Wild Mass Guess: it's the Elder Things' fault, they drew the attention.)
One such book is a collection of folk tales (well, one of many such collections) and I started reading it recently since it takes about 15 minutes to get through each of the (longer) stories.
It turns out Lancelot from King Arthur's Round Table was the inspiration behind the name (Lancelot's Shire=Lancashire) so there are a bunch of stories about him.
Buuuut there's also one about how some tween boys at a boarding school accidentally summoned the devil (for some reason, summoning the devil in this stories is always kind of vaguely easy) and their headmaster had to send him back to hell by making him count all the letters in the bible and the devil becomes intensely dyslexic when he looks at bibles I guess, so it works.
In one Lancelot-centric story (the one that's not about his mom not noticing that a water faery spirited him away at 1 month old for 18+ years entirely because she was depressed about his father's death), Lancelot has to fight the saxon Sir Tarquin, who has been kidnapping all the lower knights of the round table and filling his dungeons with them.
And also Sir Tarquin eats babies for breakfast (this is not a joke) just so you know he's really evil.
Anyways, at one point during their fight, Sir Tarquin punches Lancelot's sword, instantly shattering it, which seems very anime.
Also apparently coastal/farmland English dragons are actually not normal at all.
They're parasitic creatures that can be passed down the male bloodline and they just
infrequently turn one member of the family into a murderous worm thing.
"Not normal" when compared to Welsh dragons I guess, which are "normal" dragons.
Tricking the devil is a classic. There's a poem about a guy who got out of the deal by having the devil spend some time with his wife.
Our old pal Beholderess once spoke about her experience of reading Orlando Furioso: I'll spare you half-remembered details, but what I got out of it is that apparently a classic chivalric romance runs on shonen logic.
Relatedly, reading Katherine McGee's current series, American Royals, it's odd to see an author become more cautious about using teen drinking and drug use the further along she is in her career. Rylin starts out as a full-on "I'm good with casual drug use" type, though she does soon realize the error of her ways, and though Leda has a terrible relationship with future-drugs, the way she thinks of them is also quite casual and not very scare-them-straight.
In American Royals, nobody uses drugs at all, except the one time Daphne drugged somebody else and caused them to fall into a coma, which isn't very "pro-casual drug use". Similarly, the characters don't drink as excessively as the Thousandth Floor cast do.
Apparently, the last time I read this series was almost 7 years ago now.
https://joinbookwyrm.com
It's part of the "Fediverse" -- it uses ActivityPub to hook into the larger ecosystem of federated platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, etc. -- but it's basically an open-source federated version of a social book-listing site, akin to GoodReads I think.
I've never used GoodReads before, but I went and made an account on a BookWyrm instance.
https://bookrastinating.com/user/ReedLindwurm
Bookrastinating isn't the flagship instance, but I tend to prefer being on somewhat smaller instances anyway as far as fediverse accounts go. It doesn't really make a difference anyway though.
Anyhow, it does also have quite good coverage of books. You may notice that on my to-read list I have a mixture of fiction (including light novels), nonfiction (including a textbook), and even a tabletop RPG sourcebook. I think it's able to draw from multiple databases.
I made a goal to read 6 books this year. It's mid-May and...yeah, I haven't finished anything yet lol.
I'm stuck between wanting to join this site because I find Goodreads current platform super annoying (though they did fix the way they number books) but this looks like the sort of place that would be even more full of left-leaning types than normal book sites. I also find the "anti-corporate" stance off-putting.
As expected of a site built by majority male internet autists, the YA database is very poorly filled out.
Also I prefer just keeping my own lists of whatever nowadays rather than signing up tow websites.
I'm glad to see people on the internet are still trying their darndest to build new sites rather than just permanently coalesce around the most popular sites.
As for being "anti-corporate", the "fediverse" isn't actually against corporations per se, but rather, the idea of a federated network (of platforms and sites that can all intercommunicate) is a reaction to major companies with centralized control of social media platforms and such -- both because they can do stupid things (e.g. Twitter) and for other reasons such as them being closed-source. Mastodon (and to a lesser degree of similarity, Misskey/Calckey) being similar to Twitter is the most obvious example and probably the most famous fediverse thing at this point, but there are others -- BookWyrm can be seen as "open-source Goodreads", and there's also PeerTube, Friendica, Matrix, and others (as alternatives to YouTube, Facebook, Discord, etc., respectively).
Sidenote: WordPress now supports the ActivityPub communication protocol, which means it can communicate with, say, Mastodon. Also, Tumblr expressed interest in supporting ActivityPub but it's not yet a thing.
(Another sidenote: I did mention Matrix, but it doesn't work with ActivityPub, and isn't really part of the "fediverse"; it's just its own decentralized communication network. Also technically Matrix is the protocol name, not the platform name, but I think it's more specialized so it's referred to by its protocol rather than by any particular platform.)
The stories are also wildly different, but basically these are factory-written children's books that tell mostly standalone stories that are set in the same universe, because it doesn't have to matter what order they're read in.
Rainbow Magic at this point should have like 1,000 separate books, each based on a unique fairy (after a while it got really silly, like "Pottery Fairy", the "Trampolining Fairy" and the "Star Spotter" fairy, who is literally just a paparazzi I'm assuming). If you like a thing, and it's relatively PG, there's 100% a Rainbow Magic fairy for it.
Rainbow Magic isn't even over! It is literally a 20 year old book series that is currently ongoing. The latest book, Kimi the Bubble Tea Fairy (no jokes), came out two days ago. There was even a Coronation tie-in book (Rainbow Magic is British).
Honestly, Rainbow Magic is the book series of 2023.
Meanwhile, Unicorn Academy is more about the unique horses and their Riders I guess, but the books are basically the same thing. Spin Master literally stripped the series of everything and turned it into yet another CGI Dreamworks cartoon a la the latest incarnation of Spirit but with more magic stuff.
Anyways, I was at my local bookstore a few weeks ago when I discovered Magic Ballerina, which appears to be the exact same book-packaging thing as Rainbow Magic, except at least this time the series is divided into 1 protagonist every 6 books. I also like the idea better honestly, because I actually like ballet and they seem vaguely educational (if learning about Swan Lake counts as education).
This week, I discovered two more insane series. For example; the American classic Little Women completely transformed into some sort of American Girl knockoff, and then a series based on the Breyer Horses toy line where, in an alternate universe, the horses have butterfly wings and are the size of a... well, mini-horse toy.
Then there's the Sticker Dolly Stories book series, which is based on the Sticker Dolly Dressing series of activity books, which were kind of my thing for a few months a few years ago (they have very good historical ones). I really can't wait to read these, especially considering how kooky the developmental backstory is (how does a series of sticker books become a series of real books?
I really like how Sticker Dolly Stories has at least one male protagonist once in a while, none of these other series do. Rainbow Magic has like, two whole male fairies total and one is the literal Current King of England.
Last but not least, my absolute favorite series of these sort of books, the Fashion Fairy Princess line, which was sadly extremely unpopular and extremely poorly distributed (so I mean, of course it's my favorite). I loved the artstyle, but I can't say I have any hope to read one anytime soon. That isn't to say I won't try really hard to get a few eventually.
Update: It turns out "Daisy Meadows" has been writing the Unicorn Magic book series for a while now. I hope "she" and Spin Master get into a massive legal fight over this.
Currently slogging through American Royals III. I need to stop being such a battered spouse with YA. It's preachy, overly long and extremely obvious. I just want to finish this and the fourth and never read YA ever again.
(Until the next time, of course).
Speaking of, conservatives are currently on a bender about the gay "adult content" in "children's books" (ie, YA), specifically, certain scenes from Red, White and Royal Blue.
If it's something like Gender Queer or The GayBCs, they're generally right, but the latest in buzzworthy unrealistic gay YA fiction is basically par the course for what passes as "PG13 books" these days. Example from American Royals III.
Whilst I think none of this should be in PG13 books, the fact that they probably didn't look hard enough to realize this is endemic to YA in general rather than an insidious plot to turn straight male YA readers (pffffffffffffffff) gay is annoying me.
On one hand, yay, I actually read books.
On the other hand, I'm not really getting certain other books read that I've meant to read.