I really enjoyed CJ Archer's Glass and Steel series (and the Glass Library so far). So when I saw Scribd Everand had her Ministry of Curiosities series on audiobook last week, I jumped right on it. I'm really enjoying it 2.5 books in. Victorian England is a fascinating setting, but a lot of books trying to replicate the style just aren't that pleasant to read. Archer does a good job of using it without shoving it in your face by over explaining, and her magic is presented in a way where staying in the shadows is plausible.
Archer and Sherry Thomas's Lady Sherlock series are interesting to me because I like the story telling and character development, but they both handle the setting in a way that doesn't just ignore how actually awful the era was for women. They put their characters in position to directly clash with the harsh restrictions of the society in compelling ways.
I just finished Trail of the Lost: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail and it was a pretty interesting read. There is a local mycologist who disappeared on a hike around here a few years ago and I still wonder what happened to her and if they’ll ever find her.
Anybody who wants to understand literature, you NEED to read John Truby’s 2 books ( which absolutely-obsolete Campbell’s “Hero With A Thousand Faces”, and oceans of other such books )
“The Anatomy of Genres”
“The Anatomy of Story”
IF you don’t understand the huge amount of stuff in them, THEN you don’t understand literature.
There are niggles: he thinks “village” means Wild West village, I think “village” means Tribal Village, as somewhere between 0.5 & 2 million years of history indicate, but such things are minor, compared with what he got right.
There is other stuff, ie things specific to languages/cultures that English cannot represent, e.g…
But those 14 Genres, those are the templates we form our mind on.
Please give yourself a huge gift, & read 'em.
Anybody wanting an equivalent for presentations, then Weissman’s “Presenting to Win” is the equivalently-spectacular one,
& anybody wanting an equivalent for editing, Coyne’s “The Story Grid” is the one.
www.TVTropes.org is also a required resource for understanding literature, though it is limitless & easy to lose days/years in…
“The writer hated commas and semi colons and full stops and anything that would let a man take rest and contemplate both the novel and his station in life and often to the extent that every paragraph was actually just one endless sentence doing violence to that man’s ability to parse and consider all those elements and often something about bush craft and coffee and something about horses.”
TBF I can appreciate what he’s going for. The lack of quotes makes it less like you’re an omniscient being hearing dialogue, more like the narrator’s just repeating what someone said. I’m in the middle of Alan Wake 2 and I can’t help but read the book in Alan’s VA’s voice because the way “Alan” writes is superficially similar.
It also cranks up the impression that you’re stuck on a nonstop violence train that doesn’t really have any rhyme or reason to it. Just a series of events that occur.
It’s violence escalating over time over and over again, but it seemed to me like McCarthy didn’t want to “condemn” the glorification of it. The book is based on an actual posse of scalphunters, and to me the tone of it all seems to be on par with his other books where the main message you have to get out of it is “the world is a flaming giant turd filled to the brim with violence and hatred and it’s painful to tell you the kind ones aren’t coming out on top”. I hope I made it clear enough.
No spoilers, but yeah Blood Meridian is a strange book. It felt like a sort of apocalyptic fever dream or something. I pretty quickly stopped trying to apply the logic of our world to it and just went wherever it was taking me lol. It’s a story from some other place I think.
Nearly all of those books are nice, quick reads. I read them before playing Witcher 3 and watching the NF series first season. It greatly enhanced the game; it made me dislike the screenplay version.
Three body problem series is fantastic in my opinion. I love that heavy sci-fi shit. And viewing the world from a different cultures perspective was fascinating.
Yes. Without going into spoilers, the event that started the Deterrence Era blew my mind. It’s so rare to have an unexpected reversal like that in sci fi it really caught me by surprise.
I really wish I could read it in the original Chinese. The translator did a great job though.
Well, now you’re making me want to go back into the series. I liked the premise of the first, but found the writing foreign - which, hey, it is! I felt like I really should read more everyday Chinese fiction as I didn’t understand a lot of the nuance and it felt less polished (to my American sensibilities) as a result.
I actually just finished Three Body Problem yesterday. Really fascinating perspective and lots of big ideas, even if the characters could be better and there could be less telling and more showing. But can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of the trilogy!
A 2019 report on the racial diversity of the publishing industry showed 76 percent of the staff are White, primarily cisgender, heterosexual women. Only 6 percent of the publishing industry is Latinx, despite representing 19 percent of the U.S. population.
This author is ravenous about diversity. It’s unsettling. If there was… Just an article about what cool trans or Latin sci-fi I could read, I’d buy a book. Right now.
What these meta diversity journalists forget is that I buy books and read to relax. When I find out a world is written in a closed-minded (ie. White guy who’s never dealt with any bullshit in life) lens, it puts me out of my comfort zone.
The point of reading a book written by someone like me actually isn’t about politics. It’s actually about getting back to that comfort. The fantasies they can spin up are realistic to how I see the world. I can sit back, relax, and be immersed.
As is the norm, there's no mention at all of, or effort to even attempt to investigate, the demographics of the applicant pool/people who wish to pursue the field as a career.
You can't even have a cursory analysis of whether discrimination exists without it.
Beautiful summary. One of my favourite classics.Theres so much depth and the conversation about faith between Ivan and Alexie has stayed with me for years
For me, yes. I notice that whenever I’m reading on my phone (night mode, blue light filter, lowest light setting), I will stay awake longer, my eyes strain, it takes me longer to fall asleep. When using my kobo (not backlit, but still lit - it has those leds all around the screen that light it up from above!!), it’s like I was reading a paper book, except I can read in a dark room without any strain to my eyes whatsoever, and I can take on any position without having to adjust the light source!!! An absolute game-changer in terms of comfort. In fact, I think my eye strain is even lower with the e-ink reader compared to regular paper indoors, because I have a better light source no matter where I sit in my room.
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