Reading all of Deadpool again. I’ve just gotten to the end of Agent X. This is such an excellent use of my time. :)

(Comics are books, right?)

Gail Simone’s Deadpool is great for a number of reasons, but mostly because he shrunk the Rhino and turned him into a keychain. (Actually, was that Simone or somebody else?)

^ MUFFINS.

Have you reached that part yet?

I’m rereading the Earthsea books in preparation for Ursula K. Le Guin’s appearance at Berkeley (asldkjfldkjfldkfjldjfljd). They’re good, but strangely, as a kid I liked book 2 more than book 1, and now I like book 1 more than book 2. Maybe I just was expecting Tenar to do more. :P

Now I have to read The Farthest Shore and get a modicum of schoolwork done.

Have you reached that part yet?

omfg I just did and I had to stuff my fingers in my mouth to stop from laughing very loudly and waking the whole house up

just

DYING.

Also is it bad I thought of Elsie Dinsmore and the Hell Muffins?

but then I was about 11 or so. Maybe my opinions will change.

I read them in high school.

Finished The Cabinet of Curiosities, the third Pendergast book, which I mentioned in another thread, and OMG I love it more than ever.

Sorry about the lapse into internet speak, but—well, these books make me speechless. After all, they’re fairly predictable, and rather silly, but I care about the characters even when they’re obnoxious and the villains are despicable, and the pacing is fantastic, and most of all, no one is safe. In fact

Finished Torment.

It was named well.

At the moment I’m stymied by their availability at the library…can’t get Still Life with Crows until the 14th. Given that I just finished Thunderhead your warning frightens me.

My threshold for silly was reached while reading Wheel of Darkness. No throwing books across the room because I’m not that melodramatic, but ugh. I’m interested to know what other people think of it.

That one I think is available, even to more than one copy. I wonder if that’s a hint.

Well thanks man.

I’m halfway through A Confederacy of Dunces and it owns bones.

I just finished Generation Kill by Evan Wright. I wish I would’ve found this book, like, five years ago. Now I’m watching the miniseries. It’s a seriously good book, if you’ve got any interest in the Marines or the Iraq War or anything related in general. If you haven’t heard of either the book or the series, Evan Wright was an embedded reporter with a group of First Recon Marines who were the first into Iraq. It’s… a really fascinating story, all the more so because it’s completely true.

It’s come up in the General TV thread before at least once, but I don’t think it got a ton of discussion. The miniseries was actually the second HBO collaboration between David Simon and Ed Burns… and I’m pretty sure you can guess the first. The TV version owned, but I’ve never gotten around to finding the book.

If I hadn’t despised the characters, I don’t think I would have hated The Magicians. But I did, so when I tried to spell ‘hadn’t’, I wrote ‘hated’.

So, I’ve got the new Dresden files book.

Santa Claus is Awesome.

Disappointed by Dance of Death.

So, I have a question. Something that’s been bugging me for a while now and I thought I’d get you guys’ take on it. Reading some of the posts here have only brought this to the fore again and again.

When does intelligence contribute to narrative? Or should I say, what makes for a more entertaining book, a clever plot and/or clever characters, or a fun one? At what point is theological narrative counter-intuitive to writing something you want someone to enjoy?

Maybe this isn’t really the crux of the matter for an author. I’ve always held the opinion that as long as you enjoy what you write and it has meaning, then go for it and it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks.

Hmm.

I think both are important factors, but perhaps more important than which is more important is how well done they are. A very, very clever book can be fascinating, if you’re the sort of person who likes mysteries and puzzling out complex stories and characters. But if the author is trying too hard to be clever, then it comes off as pretentious and annoying; see every ranty post we’ve collectively ever made against literary fiction and especially Annie Proulx. At the same time, in a really fun and entertaining book, you can throw logic to the wind and just enjoy the ride, provided you’re the sort of person who can turn off the part of your brain that overanalyzes things (which I sometimes have trouble with). But if you’re trying so hard to be quirky and what-have-you, like Modelland comes across as in the current sporks, it quickly goes past fun to annoying.

And, like Willow said, the best books often combine them both. They’re clever enough to keep you guessing, but stay entertaining, even when dealing with serious things.

Here’s some examples of what I mean:
An “intelligence”-heavy book, I can’t think of a really good example, because most of the ones I can think of are still very entertaining. I suppose any number of military or spy thrillers could fall into this category, with complex plots and double agents and triple agents and quadruple agents all over the place. Maybe a classic like the Iliad or something, although it’s certainly prone to completely random stuff happening (although that’s another layer of complexity, because that’s the whole plotline about the gods).
A “fun”-heavy book series is the Oz books, which I mentioned in the Modelland spork comments as being an example of a series that makes absolutely no logical sense by real-world rules. Yet because it’s so darn fun and the characters are neat, you don’t really care.
Books that combine the two (although more on the fun side of the scale) are the Discworld series. They’re hilarious, but Pratchett makes some very insightful remarks on various things (including the inanity of the world itself) and there’s some quite serious themes, especially in the later books. And Pratchett firmly subscribes to the theory that audiences need to work to catch every nuance.

I made this all up right now, but it feels right. What do you think? I guess the tl;dr version is that I don’t necessarily think one is better or worse, it’s just that either can be done very badly (to make a poor book) or very well (to make a great book).

For instance, you have a point to make and you really want to make it, but the only way to do so will change the characters in a way many readers would be dispassionate about. How do you handle that?

Write it anyway. Unless whatever has been happening up until that point doesn’t really warrant any changes. Characters alone aren’t being used to make your point. Most likely, or hopefully, you’re also criticizing their environment, society, etc. to get a statement across and not just having them spout off random observations that don’t make them seem a believable product of their world and influences. That you allow that transformation at all should be more important than what they do transform into. You can hate a character and still love what you’ve read up until then that made them that way.

In such a case, does an author simply write what he wants to write, or does he temper it for his audience?

I don’t know about that particular example, about the Amber Spyglass, but as it would be with any other book, if the sole interest was to sermonize then a negative reaction should be expected. If authors really want to write for themselves, and do that alone, there’s nothing stopping them from doing so and then shutting everything away in a drawer. However personal the matter, depending on the effect they wish to have, authors owe it to themselves to communicate their points in a way that doesn’t make the whole thing feel like poorly disguised preaching. But one’s own wants for the final product doesn’t have to be sacrificed for the sake of achieving a successful interaction between message and reader. And successful does not always have to mean your reader absolutely fell in love with every single word on the page. Even if they do become dispassionate with the character eventually, do they at least understand why it happened? More importantly, did the author make sure such things happened for good reasons?

To be quite frank, I’m of the opinion that if the sole reason a person wants to write is to get across some big message, they should just write a nonfiction essay on the subject.

This times 1,000.

Wow, those are exactly the answers I was looking for. Thank you Sen and swenson!

I think, this is actually quite a difficult thing to do in practise. Dystopian fiction is very hard to pull off with meaning and it quickly becomes stale either way. I think you’ve helped me understand this quite a bit though.

Thanks again you two (and Willow of course). Valuable insight indeed.

Going through John C Wright’s Hermetic Millennia.

It’s like reading a Grant Morrison that’s sober and knows how to crank the awesomeness to a trillion. (yes, that was a bad pun)

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Avenali Lecture

I was there!

SWQ used her ninja powers to attend.

This is a really awkward video.

It’s kind of like My Dinner with Andre — a primarily auditory experience, not a visual one.

If anyone’s thinking about reading Stephen R. Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle, skip it.

Started it. Got bored and did something else.

I thought it was just me who thought that the series was stupid. I know a lot of people who like it, and think that the characters were good at first, but the moment that someone starts talking to God, I start getting irritated. Then again I wasn’t overly thrilled with Mists of Avalon either for some of the same reasons that I didn’t like the Pendragon Cycle.

MZB also didn’t so much say “This religion is right and that one is wrong,” and instead went with “The beliefs are good, but the people pushing them are bad.”

Unfortunately I got a little too much of a “Men and Christianity (because is patriarchal)=bad/Women and My Kind of Paganism=good” subtext, but I’ll give that she wasn’t nearly as bad as she was in Hawkmistress or Witchlight. And, as you said, from what I remember about the book, she usually gave her characters understandable motives and reasons for why they did things other than the villain ball and to show that ‘Lol pagans were bad ya’ll. They worshiped demons!’

Lawhead kind of was an insult to attempting to make a rebuttal to Brandon and say that these people weren’t so bad. There were other ways to go about it that didn’t involve talking to God directly, thus catapulting the character into Studom, and shoving beliefs down people’s throats. Like using the actual stories about what happened and why, instead of trumping up a friction that, from what I’ve researched in my History classes, wasn’t as common as people think. But, naturally, the local chiefs getting together to debate about the pros and cons of conversion like adults was far too boring and not preachy enough. We needed to have chats with God.

Still, yeah, I really prefer Bernard Cornwell’s take on the story.

I’ve heard his Warlord trilogy was better.

^^I loved those! :)

Well, it’s been almost a day, so I feel justified in double-posting.

Finished Taliesin. Nothing in the last few chapters changed my opinion of the book – it’s still a preachy, poorly-researched pile of fail. I’m going to listen to Furies of Calderon now. Maybe Jim Butcher can make it better.

:( I like Stephen R Lawhead. Not a big fan of the Grail and Avalon. But I really liked Arthur and Taliesin as well.

@ Falling: To be fair, most of Taliesin was alright. It’s only the last quarter or so (after Taliesin and Charis leave Ynys Wydrrin) that it gets unbearable. Taliesin got really preachy. It was like a literary Jesus Juke – I came to read about Arthurian legend, not how everyone should be Christians. Also, the whole reason for Taliesin and Chars leaving in the first place struck me as stupid.

And I thought that Hood was okay.

I might go back to his Pendragon Cycle at some point. But for now, I’m going to explore some other takes on the Arthur story.

@ Orlando: I’m planning on getting to Sharpe soon. I’ve watched some of the movies, though. Seeing young Sean Bean is weird.

The stuff with Atlantis was okay, I just wish that there’d been more focus on the war. It also feels really out-of-place here, what with it being contemporaneous to what’s going on in Britain. I honestly think it would have been better if everything on Atlantis was in another book.

I know it’s not supposed to be straight-up history (the inclusion of magic kinda futzes with that), but it’s still set in Roman Britain (where there’s people writing this stuff down), as opposed to sub-Roman Britain (where most records were written centuries after the fact). It really bothered me when a group of Saxons joined up with Picts and Irish to attack northern Wales. That just makes no logical sense.

I think you can have religion as a central part of a story without getting preachy, but it’d be really difficult. You have to treat it with respect, not treat characters with differing beliefs as bad and/or stupid, not have religion be the sole determining factor in whether a person is good or bad, allow the protagonists to have flaws, struggle, and possibly fail, and probably a lot of other things I can’t think of at the moment.

In short, it’s hard to do, and even then you’re probably going to offend somebody. Better to just avoid it in my opinion. :)

And what do you mean by “the first of the Sharpe series”? Are you going by publishing order, or by when they’re set?

I’m not so much bothered by Saxons being mentioned, because from what I remember they’re just raiding, which they actually did. The Romans even built a series of forts to defend the so-called Saxon Shore.

Of course, said forts were along the southern and eastern coast of Britain – you know, where the Saxons were actually a threat.

But, yeah, my initial reaction was to go, “That’s pretty far out of the way for a raid. And why are they teaming up with the Picts and Irish anyway?”

And as for the Irish, they did establish a kingdom in southern Wales after the Romans left. But again, why they’re working with the Picts and Saxons, I have no idea.

The guys they attack in the book are Britons, but they’re also allies of the Romans, and I believe the Irish and Picts teamed up to take down the Roman fortifications.

That and, well, plot.

Most of Taliesin is good, if not terribly exciting. There’s no single plot/conflict tying the whole thing together, apart from it just being a record of the protagonsts’ lives, which can be interesting. If the last few chapters had been cut, I would have enjoyed the book a whole lot more.

Give it a shot; read the first few chapters on amazon or thumb through a copy if you can find one.

I’m stuck in The Book of the Dead; I just can’t get into it, I can’t care. I really liked the Pendergast series when Pendergast wasn’t really the central character. After all, it’s not like he has a personality, because he’s just your generic Sherlock Holmes expy with literary-albinism and a Southern accent.

Oh does the series move on then? Because that’s part of my ‘stuckness’ and if they go back to the pattern of the earlier books I’d have a much easier time plowing through this one.

Just finished reading the first Dresden Files book. As with A Game of Thrones, I’m left with the feeling of, my word I’m an idiot for not reading this already.

Seriously, that series gets more and more awesome as time goes on.

Republic of Thieves finally has a release date.

I can now take Scott Lynch off my “Waiting impatiently for the next book” list.

So I just finished Dead Beat. I think I can safely say that is the single most awesome climax ever, of all time.

I’m not sure about that, but it at least maintains a high awesomeness quotient.

Especially when he’s being a dork.

Hear, hear. It really makes him a more fun character. Particularly when you match him up against other Urban Fantasy protagonists. You really end up rooting for him.

Oh my goodness, yes. The first time he made a Star Trek, Star Wars, Tolkien, etc. etc. reference, I about died. I’m only surprised that there wasn’t a BSG reference, you know about

But then, considering his penchant for blowing up technology, perhaps he just hasn’t been able to catch up on newer TV shows.

Well. I can safely say that Changes did not end how I expected. And Ghost Story did not begin how I expected. I am now somewhat concerned about how it ends.

Just stick with it, swenson. The end of Changes and all of Ghost Story are… weird. It will make sense in the end.

Depends on the god I guess. There were some gods that I would like to avoid like the plague.

Finished up John C Wright’s Hermetic Millennia.

I liked it, but MAN the ending was one of the worst violations of rhythm I’ve ever seen. I’m seriously recommending that you read this, AFTER the third book is released.

Oh, awesome. That sounds like a fun class!

I’m going to have to buy this book. And the two follow-ups.

I just started Dracula for my Victorian Lit. class.
So far it is mainly Jonathan Harker’s comments on the inn, the local people, and what he had for dinner. But I’m only a couple pages in.