The Book Thread

[Headless]

Steven Brust.

He's the one who writes Vald Taltos.  He wrote a serries that takes place well before that "the Phoenix Guards" which as far as I know is based on the "Three Musketeers" the writting is wordy and over wrought, but thats the point.  

Durast?  Have you read them?  I figure you will either love them or hate them.

[kosmos1214]

Ugh. Well...  I guess I can't do worse than to just give you a line from the book.


Now, in isolation that might not be too bad. A touch formal and wordy, but it could just be circumstances... but the whole damn book is written like that. Pilot Cantra? That's the other main character (Jela being the first, I guess)...  that's right, the two main characters... who eventually admit they are (OF COURSE!!!) in love with each other, tend to refer to one another by formal titles.  Most, if not all, of the time.

It doesn't really get the Joss Whedon style in-talk I mentioned, but there is a limit to how much re-reading I'm gonna do.

Ah I can see the point It's A little to much for the whole book not because of the idea but at some point you are going to drop the long winded speak and say the equivalent of "Shoot the mofo thats shooting at us".
But I do agree the titles thing is going to be A bit much while depending on social standards it may be normal in public but in privet at some point that's going to drop off.And the rereading is A fair point as well I doubt I'd have to do to much rereading of lines but I know it would be slow reading.

[Spike]

Steven Brust.

He's the one who writes Vald Taltos.  He wrote a serries that takes place well before that "the Phoenix Guards" which as far as I know is based on the "Three Musketeers" the writting is wordy and over wrought, but thats the point.  

Durast?  Have you read them?  I figure you will either love them or hate them.

I've pretty much read everything Brust ever wrote, at least up until fairly recently.  Brust has a better ear for flow, and he is mimicking a very good author himself with the phoenix guard series (though... when he started getting into Sethra Lavode and the like the series started losing some of its charm. Still fun, however.)

Another key point here is that overwrought writing is layered on top of a story that sort of meanders towards its conclusion, rather than having an actual plot, and gives us mythic founding hero stories as just another mary-sue romance following what is now a rather tired formula from these particular authors.

[Voros]

Reading stories from these two Penguin collections on my nightstand. S.T. Joshi's series of horror writers for Penguin is excellent stuff.

Right now I give the edge to Machen. Re-reading 'The White People' is has lost none of its power, it is the rare piece of fiction worthy of the term visionary.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1913[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1914[/ATTACH]

[Spike]

I recently found a novel on my bookshelf, The Nimble Man, that I know I had read, but could not recall anything about it other than it was vaguely similar to... say... The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

So, having a day off, I read it.

And in reading it, I remember why I didn't remember it.




So, the set-up is that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, secretly became an Immortal Wizard and fights against 'great evil (tm)' with his Menagerie of freaks.  Specifically he's got a hobgoblin squire, a Faerie Girlfriend, Eve (of Adam and Eve fame, who is, in this case, ALSO the mother of all vampires), and Clay... as in Genesis.. God's Clay, from which he... er... HE shaped all life, but apparently just left lying around when HE was done with it. Oh, and a Pulp Hero who is also a Ghost, Dr Leonard Graves.

Its... an interesting group of characters. Some bold choices along the way. Apparently they did four of these books (Two authors), but stopped when they ran out of fans to justify making more. But back to This Book.

So the book starts with Doyle looking for his long lost mentor, Sanguedolce the Wizard, who is so powerful and awesome (and a right bastard as well) that his half century of absense from teh world of magic weirdos is apparently an earthshattering problem (no.. I'm not kidding about that!) as he 're-gathers' his Menagerie.

Only his ex-girlfriend's aunt, Morrigan, steals the crysalis holding Sanguedolce's sleeping body to use his power to open the prison of The Nimble Man and bring him into our reality. Who is the Nimble Man you ask? Er... he's... sort of Lucifer's stupid little brother, I guess?  He's a rebellious Angel who was somehow slick enough not to get sent to Hell, and was instead imprisoned in Limbo or something.  


So. Problems.

The book is massively self-referential. So much so that it manages to tell about half of a decent story for its page-count.  We're told about twenty times how Dr. Graves (the Pulp Hero Ghost) can't rest until he finds how who assassinated him fifty years earlier. We're told a dozen or so times how Squire the Hobgoblin is... a Squire and how Hobgoblins walk Shadowpaths.  Because, you know, we forgot how we were told that just a page earlier.    We are reminded time and again how tough Eve is, and how much she LOVES fashion, and every bit of squabbling between Eve and Squire is accompanied by side comments from the narration about how they bicker because they like eachother or something. Nothing is just allowed to unfold, nothing is allowed to happen on its own, and so the decent ideas in the book aren't given any time to breath, to come to life... choked to death by the Authors (plural) inability to not point out what they are doing... constantly.

Not that there aren't other problems.  Doyle is not even 200 years old yet (in the book) and yet his 'immortality' seems to put him on par with Clay and Eve, who have existed from the dawn of creation (earlier, I guess, for Clay?)... which... no. It doesn't.  Not that there isn't a great amount of tradition in, oh, Vampire fiction to treat a sixty year old man who happens to be a vampire as some great ancient thing... like... I don't know any living sixty year olds, right?

There there is that whole weird subtext where if Sanguedolce ISN"T God the almighty in disguise then I'll eat my hat, even if nothing else in the book indicates that the authors are capable of that level of subtlety about their characters. And if he is, my god, what an asshole God is... though, I suppose, given what we know of Eve and Clay, is par for the course for this book.  Its a weird stance to take: God is real, but he's a massive dickhead.

[Voros]

Sounds like an attempt at the kind of literary mashup that Jeter, Newman and Powers created sometime back in the 80s.

[Headless]

You spend a lot of time reading bad books and watching bad movies.

[nightlamp]

I'm a couple stories into The Horror on the Links: the Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Vol. 1 by Seabury Quinn, I picked up the Kindle version for a song.  They're decent paranormal-detective fare, pulpy and fun, but the namesake detective is kind of annoying with his incessant French exclamations.  Reading these makes me want to go re-read some John Silence or Carnacki stories.

[Spike]

Oddly, I'm more likely to comment on the bad ones. Good stuff gets a shrug and a meh, that was good when I'm done.

Actually, my next read is Ancillery Justice, which I understand actually deserved the awards it was nominated for (won?) a couple years ago.  Then again, its the same format as Jennifer Government, which some people praised to high hell for me that I found to be rather... meh.  Not, you know, super bad just... meh. I may still re-read it, in a few more years.

[Warboss Squee]

I recently found a novel on my bookshelf, The Nimble Man, that I know I had read, but could not recall anything about it other than it was vaguely similar to... say... The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

So, having a day off, I read it.

And in reading it, I remember why I didn't remember it.




So, the set-up is that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, secretly became an Immortal Wizard and fights against 'great evil (tm)' with his Menagerie of freaks.  Specifically he's got a hobgoblin squire, a Faerie Girlfriend, Eve (of Adam and Eve fame, who is, in this case, ALSO the mother of all vampires), and Clay... as in Genesis.. God's Clay, from which he... er... HE shaped all life, but apparently just left lying around when HE was done with it. Oh, and a Pulp Hero who is also a Ghost, Dr Leonard Graves.

Its... an interesting group of characters. Some bold choices along the way. Apparently they did four of these books (Two authors), but stopped when they ran out of fans to justify making more. But back to This Book.

So the book starts with Doyle looking for his long lost mentor, Sanguedolce the Wizard, who is so powerful and awesome (and a right bastard as well) that his half century of absense from teh world of magic weirdos is apparently an earthshattering problem (no.. I'm not kidding about that!) as he 're-gathers' his Menagerie.

Only his ex-girlfriend's aunt, Morrigan, steals the crysalis holding Sanguedolce's sleeping body to use his power to open the prison of The Nimble Man and bring him into our reality. Who is the Nimble Man you ask? Er... he's... sort of Lucifer's stupid little brother, I guess?  He's a rebellious Angel who was somehow slick enough not to get sent to Hell, and was instead imprisoned in Limbo or something.  


So. Problems.

The book is massively self-referential. So much so that it manages to tell about half of a decent story for its page-count.  We're told about twenty times how Dr. Graves (the Pulp Hero Ghost) can't rest until he finds how who assassinated him fifty years earlier. We're told a dozen or so times how Squire the Hobgoblin is... a Squire and how Hobgoblins walk Shadowpaths.  Because, you know, we forgot how we were told that just a page earlier.    We are reminded time and again how tough Eve is, and how much she LOVES fashion, and every bit of squabbling between Eve and Squire is accompanied by side comments from the narration about how they bicker because they like eachother or something. Nothing is just allowed to unfold, nothing is allowed to happen on its own, and so the decent ideas in the book aren't given any time to breath, to come to life... choked to death by the Authors (plural) inability to not point out what they are doing... constantly.

Not that there aren't other problems.  Doyle is not even 200 years old yet (in the book) and yet his 'immortality' seems to put him on par with Clay and Eve, who have existed from the dawn of creation (earlier, I guess, for Clay?)... which... no. It doesn't.  Not that there isn't a great amount of tradition in, oh, Vampire fiction to treat a sixty year old man who happens to be a vampire as some great ancient thing... like... I don't know any living sixty year olds, right?

There there is that whole weird subtext where if Sanguedolce ISN"T God the almighty in disguise then I'll eat my hat, even if nothing else in the book indicates that the authors are capable of that level of subtlety about their characters. And if he is, my god, what an asshole God is... though, I suppose, given what we know of Eve and Clay, is par for the course for this book.  Its a weird stance to take: God is real, but he's a massive dickhead.

I am fairly sure I've read that one. Had completely forgotten it.

[Spike]

I am fairly sure I've read that one. Had completely forgotten it.

Well... That WOULD be the problem now, wouldn't it?  How can a book with so much awesome in the setup wind up being so very, very forgettable?  That takes real talent!

[Warboss Squee]

Well... That WOULD be the problem now, wouldn't it?  How can a book with so much awesome in the setup wind up being so very, very forgettable?  That takes real talent!

I remember enough to believe your analysis is spot on.

[Bedrockbrendan]

Oddly, I'm more likely to comment on the bad ones. Good stuff gets a shrug and a meh, that was good when I'm done.

Actually, my next read is Ancillery Justice, which I understand actually deserved the awards it was nominated for (won?) a couple years ago.  Then again, its the same format as Jennifer Government, which some people praised to high hell for me that I found to be rather... meh.  Not, you know, super bad just... meh. I may still re-read it, in a few more years.

I read Ancillary Justice back when it won the award. It was not deserving of the hatred it got, but I am also not sure it was deserving of the award. It is a good story. When I first started reading it, I was really wondering why it won an award. As I read further, that was less of a mystery to me.  It isn't the greatest science fiction though. If I had to give it a ranking it would be 4 out of 5 stars. It does a very odd thing though with pronouns in the book because it is narrated through the point of view of a ship's AI (which has trouble distinguishing men and women). In the end, I think that choice, while it produces some interesting things, made the story more confusing and made individual characters a lot harder to remember. Still the first book is a really good read. I would say the second book is a disappointment in comparison though.

[Spike]

I don't recall it getting any hatred, not even from the various puppy factions, same with Three Body Problem, which I haven't bothered to track down yet, seeing as my reading has dropped way off from what it was a decade or so ago.  Was a time where finding me without a book in my hands or on my person was near impossible...

[Voros]

I'm reading George Saunders Lincoln in Bardo right now. His first novel, I've always liked Saunders funny surreal short stories. This is a surreal collage novel drawing on historical sources, newspaper articles, etc about Lincoln's dead son travelling through the Tibetan Bardo along with the spirits of the Civil War dead.

Pretty strange, it is interesting to see the old Burroughs' cut-up method used in a different way. I also feel that the Gaelic novel The Dirty Dust (a graveyard of the Irish dead talking), Robert Penn Warren's amazing Brother to Dragons (a slave murdered by Jefferson's nephews narrated by the ghost of Jefferson) and John Dos Passos USA trilogy have to be influences.

In terms of games, reading it I'm imagining a game that tries to use The Book of the Dead to structure a game around ghosts/spirits. The Wraith and Ghostwalk have both tackled the idea of an RPG where you play ghosts, any others?