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Best and Worst Books of 2003?
Thousandstars writes "I saw the article on the best and worst movies of 2003, and, being a literature geek, I thought it would also be appropriate to ask for the best and worst books of 2003. In fiction, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is toward the top of my best list. How about everyone else?"
I thought the Lord of the Rings series was a great set of books. I can't wait for someone to make a movie out of it.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
The LOTR trilogy gets my vote. Very faithful to teh movies.
is at the top of my Best AND Worst list.
I'd like to nominate the SCO court filings for best work of fiction...and worst work of fiction.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
How about the Divinci Code?
And of course The Art of Unix Programming
My worst reading for 2003 was: The Last Goodbye
.02,
I received the book to review ahead of time... It was absolutely terrible. I don't know about the rest of the world but I am not into reading books written as if I was reading at a third grade level (ie Stephen King's latest works). Trying to be bio-tech and computer savvy when you aren't just does not work.
I was also irked by the author's apparent need to mention the race of the characters in the novel. It was almost as if he was trying to point out that it is possible for those of color to become lawyers and famous musicians (duh). Let the read imagine whatever they like about the characters don't shove it in their face.
Just my worthless
I expect submissions from Daryl McBride soon. Hopefully I don't have to pay $699 for the book.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
Quicksilver was good... but it took me about 400 pages to get "into" the story, and the ending 100 pages dragged for all but the final two sentences.
The book was good, but I wouldn't put it on my "best of" list. It ended with a soft fizzle the same as Snow Crash.
More data, damnit!
Latest from the Swagger novels. I suggest starting with 'Hot Springs' and reading the entire series. He is a fantastic writer
In the non-fiction category, Eric S. Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming" gets my vote. It's simply excellent.
anything by him..
author of "Perdido street station"..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Movies have a definitive time they are out and you usually go see them during that period.
Books are much more flexible, you don't need to constrain yourself to a rigid schedule or anything. I usually go out a few times a year a pick several interesting books that I'll read as time allows me to. When deciding what to get, release date (that is, the 2003 books for example) is not even considered; I just search for interesting stuff or previously unknown stuff from interesting authors.
But it may just be me.
If you are into history I recommend this book:
6 70 030759/qid=1072126966//ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i0_xgl14/002 -1914962-9961668?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
Interesting perspective into the role of science in the Nazi regime with moral/philosophical undertones.
Execute? [Y/N] _
I hate to say this, but the Crossroads of Twilight, the 10th Robert Jordan "Wheel of Time" book, really sucked. No major plot advancement has happened at all. Several pages are spent on one of the main characters taking a bath! It seems like in these books, time goes slower and slower. I think the series has gone downhill, since about the fifth book or so, but this one was really bad. I see no way for him to end the series in my life time, at this pace, with so many dangling plot threads, and a release cycle of one book every two years,
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Terry Pratchett's "Nightwatch" wasn't too bad, though it was not IMO as good as the previous 'Nightwatch' books such as "Guards! Guards!" and "Men of Arms", but it is definitely worth checking out if you're a Discworld fan. I haven't read "Monsterous Regiment" yet, anyone have an opinion on how that was?
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Quicksilver was a cool book. However, IMHO it wasn't nearly as good as Cryptonomicon. Here's why:
* The characters feel similar to those in Cryptonomicon (another crazy Shaftoe, Daniel Waterhouse is akin to the main character from Crypto).
* One of the hardest things to do right when there are parallel plotlines is connect them in a flowing and lucid manner. Cryptonomicon did an excellent job of weaving the past and present together. In Quicksilver, we get large chunks of uninterrupted narration, but there's very little context switching. This left me a little bored at times.
It really felt rushed, like there was a great book in there that needed more time to be distilled.
Don't get me wrong, I'm going to read the next two volumes, I was just a little disappointed that Quicksilver didn't live up to the high standards Stephenson has set himself in previous books.
I'm an illiterate product of the American public school system.
Now lets return back to epic diatribes on Battlestar Galactica as quickly as possible.
By far, the worst book I've (tried to) read this year would be this piece of crap. There are better soap operas that have characters that are more realistic. Stay away from this and the rest of Sara Douglas's books. "The best writer in Austrilia"? Wow! I'm glad I don't live there!
A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without a brick tied to its head.
The Watch by Dennis Danvers.
I know, it was published in 2001 but the paperback came out this year!
KROPOTKIN THROUGH TTTIIIMMMMEEEEE!!!!
Ha ha.
./revolution
Some books that were "a hell of a lot better than I expected".
"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" was pretty good - some "duh" moments with the characters that made you want to smack them all in the head and shout "Stop acting like you're 12!", but overall, pretty damned good.
"Wolves of Callah". Go figure - I thought this would suck, since Mr. King seams to have lost something after his accident. But the story, even when I had pretty much figured things out, was still pretty good.
On the "not great but not bad" area I'd put "The Da Vinci Code". Clever as hell idea, some interesting observations that had me going to my art books to check it out - great from that point of view. Great book to get people interested in art and the symbols used in literature, paintings, music, and so on.
But why did the main characters Sophie and Robert suffer such massive brain farts at times? They'd talk about huge ideas in symbology - then 50 pages later, be stumped by a puzzle they had talked about earlier! (Well, and there was the incredible coincidence that a Harvard professor and a cryptologist both happen to be hot - how did that work out?)
I think for my most enjoyed book so far this year was "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" by Al Franken. I don't agree with all of his politics, thought he had some good points, some bad points, and some so-so points - but damn if it wasn't funny and at least thought provoking at times.
Worst book? "Chosen", the novelization for the last season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". I mean - punctuation mistakes all over the place, and somebody used "find and replace" in a bad way. Amazing how the word First and Chosen are always capitzlized, even when "Buffy was First into the room"? Remember, kids - even after you use Command-F, Command-V, Enter, you still need to proof read the damned thing.
Just my opinions, of course. I still have to read Stephenson's "Quicksilver", but it's not out on peanutpress.com yet, and I'm not sure I have space in my backpack for another meatspace book.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I thought the New Testament was pretty good, but it lacks a lot of the action of the Old Testament. The use of metaphor was nice. Personally, I would have like a better ending. The 4 horseman things has been way overdone...
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
I really enjoyed two books by Isaac Adamson -- Hokkaido Popsicle and the earlier Tokyo Suckerpunch. It's hard to describe them, but they're perfect for Japanophiles and other Asia-pop enthusiasts>
Worst book of 2003 is easy -- Hillary Clinton's memoirs. As much as I detest her, she's obviously an interesting person but her book sounded like it was written by her staff and focus-grouped before publication.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I would categorize them as the year's worst work of friction.
#define DRM chmod 000
"think of it as evolution in action"
I've tried 3 times to read Cryptonimicon and each time I get bored of the story. There is an irony in his seeming love for using Haiku in the story because I find nothing elegantly simple in the way he writes. I find that the story is far too verbose and would benefit greatly from a lengthy and discriminating editor.
The phrase "Literature Geek" makes me wonder, can you be a "Sports Geek"? Or a "Fashion Geek"?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Oryx and Crake was a pretty decent number. Anyone who thinks that bio-engineering is out of control will eat this stuff up. Three cheers for pigoons and wolvogs!
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Why not just ask for a list of books worth reading? I've read a few that aren't the "best" ever, or the "worst," but it was worth the time.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Dude where's my country?
People who have witty things here blow.
Personally, I'm interested in politics, so I found Dude, Where's My Country? to be a very interesting work. Moore improves on Stupid White Men a lot by incorporating many more references to works cited, and elaborating his position better. For that matter, one of my textbooks made interesting reading: Gov't and Business.
Worst book? Anything by Ann Coulter. She claims in her latest book, Treason, that being liberal is a sin worse than terrorism. If that isn't hateful and just plain wacked, I don't know what is.
#define DRM chmod 000
In fiction, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is toward the top of my best list.
Frankly, with my expectations based on Cryptonomicron, Quicksilver disappointed me. While it set the scene pretty well, and made its depiction of Stuart England after the Protectorate believable for me, the plot really went nowhere -- or it went too far afield.
And after about page 500, even the scenery began to dull, because so little was happening on the scenery. Plus, the clever ideas of Cryptonomicron were little in evidence; there was more exposition and less intellectual delight, even though one might think much could be done with a cast of characters including Newton, Leibniz and Hooke.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The Linux zealots guide to getting laid had lots of great insight in this one. Even more useful than 2002's The Linux zealots guide to hygiene.
But Stephenson's style tries my patience. His books have gotten successively less fun to read. He clearly did a lot of research, but he bludgeons you with it instead of just letting it improve the story.
Your favorite
After a failed venture in high school, I find myself trying to plow through this series once again. Does it ever end? I mean it's a truly remarkable story, but it HAS to end somewhere, right??
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
It amazes how he keeps drawing the lamest details out to infinite purportions. Get it MR. JORDAN - FINISH THE FREAKING 10 BOOK SERIES. I AM getting OLD and TIRED.
Best book(s): Chobits by Clamp
Worst book: The Torcon 3 (2003 World Science Fiction Convention) Pocket Program
I refuse to pick up a copy of "a new spring" or whatever the title is.
I might read it when the series is finished, but Ill not reward him for another delaying tactic.
They're boring, predictable, and are big ego trips for the authors:
Ann Coulter : Treason : Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
Al Franken : Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
Michael Moore : Dude, Where's My Country?
Bill O'Reilly : Who's Looking Out for You?
Eric Alterman : What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News
Sean Hannity : Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism
Alan Colmes : Red, White & Liberal : How Left Is Right & Right Is Wrong
And a lot more. Surprisingly, lots of these books sell a lot, preaching to the choir of the converted, yet contributing no new ideas or being slightly interesting.
- sigs are for wimps.
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was a lot of fun, even if the Priory of Sion has turned out to be a fraud.
I'm looking forward to his next book which will be about Freemasonry.
IT"S A VARY GROSS PICTARE of a woman with HER BUTT in teh air with teh POOPIE comuing out of her poophole and it OMGH IT SI TEH DSIGUSTING OMG OMGO OMGOMGOMG ROFLFLFLFES DON NOT CLICKOS THIS AT ALL KEKEKEKEEK
The sad thing is that there are people who will actually get this garbage for a Christmas present.
ditto for the previous 9 books.
Like I say, there a great set of 300 page books stretched out into a set of 1000 page books.
Do we really need 3 pages on the fact that it is foggy?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
After _Cryptonomicon_ my expectations were high. Early on in _Quicksilver_ I realized that there was no way this book could be as good as the earlier one, so I adjusted my hopes downward accordingly...and even then, I was disappointed.
The flaws are numerous.
The one thing that everyone knows about the book is that it contains a frantic pile of trivia. I was actually looking forward to this aspect of the book, given that I enjoy random learning opportunities as much as the next geek, and given that this is one part of _Cryptonomicon_ that I was enthused about. _QS_ disappoints in this regard. To my mind there are two main bins that trivia are sorted in to: (1) those random items that are capable of clicking in an interesting way into the knowledge structure I already have; and (2) utterly random tidbits. NS delivered a few of the former, and a few truck-loads of the latter. In so far as the trivia was interesting, I already knew it (Germanic witch trials, etymology of the word "dollar", the broad outlines and purposes of the various 16th century political structures), and in so far as the trivia was not something I already knew, I found it dreadfully boring (hail-storms of random names of royalty, many of them playing minimal roles in the plot, etc.).
Ah. I used the word "plot", so I've segued onto the next region of disappointment. _QS_ does not have a plot, in the conventional sense. Sure, in a 900 page novel (or a 2,700 page novel, really), one wouldn't expect the broad sweep of the action to be clear by page 50, or 100...but by page 500 or so, one would hope to have an idea of where things might be going. The book has Theme aplenty.
The Theme, however ("Things Really Changed a Whole Lot, Religiously, Economically, Politically, and Scientifically"), is big, but too insubstantial and too vague to construct a huge novel like this on. _A Winter's Tale_ managed to work very well with out a real plot - it could hang off of the Theme that "New York changes a lot, and is magical through the ages". Then again, _A Winter's Tale_ was about 1/9th the length of Stephenson's Inflated Series.
Speaking of inflation, this book needed an editor, badly. Dialogue and exposition are clunky in many many places. For that matter, dialogue and exposition are poorly differentiated. There's a joke about 1950's science fiction that 3/4 of the plot and background information are revealed in "As you know, Bob" asides. The same is true of _QS_. There's some minor variation on a theme: there's "As you know", there is "I need not mention the fact that X ...< 1,000 words
elided >...because you already know that", and there is "as everyone in
the town knew...".
There's a persistent and pernicious meme in the art world that to truly convey some situations you need to recreate those situations for the audience. Thus, the only way to convey tedium is through a four hour movie, etc. NS seemed to be held by this meme: to convey the intellectual ferment and vast scope of the 17th century he felt the need write a book that was adrift in a ferment and vast in scope. Certainly he could not have conveyed these things in a novella, but that does not mean that he could not have pruned perhaps a third of what he wrote.
The book is large enough that there's a Dramatis Personae at the end, which was somewhat useful...but it didn't work wonderfully well for me, because the entries were fairly short and defined the characters (well, historical figures) mostly in terms of descriptors and events that did not take place inside the book. If I come across a character who I know was present 500 pages earlier, but I'm trying to remember whether that character was a alchemist or a merchant, it helps little to learn that the character was a friend of the Duke of Wessex (or what have you). This is not a huge departure from how Dramatis Personae are usu
I thought this would make my year but turns out it was nothing but a lie
My grandmother gave me one for last Xmas. According to some sources, it's #1 bestseller of all times.
I am sorry, it's boring and redundant, I couldn't take it after page 20 or so.
it's probably an example of the "I'm going to run for President so I need to appear intellectual by writing a book" thing. It probably was focus-grouped before publication - that way she doesn't have anything in writing to embarrass her later. Since the books written by future/current Presidential candidates seem to have had anything interesting strained out of them to avoid conflicts with future political positions, they're probably best avoided anyway. For politics, there are probably better places to go for informed commentary on their plans, and as personal background it probably isn't very useful.
The more interesting version of her book should come out about thirty years from now.
Though it came out late last year, I wasn't able to read it until this year. Bringin g Down the House was a really cool book to read and was extremely interesting. The author created a great story around the true events.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
You get to the last book of a dekalogy only to realize that the author sucks.
Sturgeon's Law, dude, means that you have inverted the true number of Wheel of Time tomes that suck.
Jordan's corollary: Sturgeon was an optimist.
A friend suggested that Jordan's works were a manifestation of his subliminal hatred for trees spawned from the time he fell out of a tree as a child. Why else would so mulch wood pulp be wasted on his dreck?
You forgot to place it in a category!!!
.....INCOMING!!!...
best or worst...?!
# Begin flamewar!!!
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
I read Kim Stanley Robinson's _The Years of Rice and Salt_ and I like it a lot. It was a Hugo nominee. It's an alternate history, where all of Europe was destroyed by the Plague (instead of only a third) and world history is shaped by the Chinese, the Indians and the world of Islam.
I'm reading _Quicksilver_ now, and it's actually really cool that they are many parallels. Alchemists, invention of the scientific method, the books keep reminding me of each other. Very nice.
I don't know if there are any people who find the first part of Quicksilver hard going: read on, the second part is brilliant :-)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
...is yet another list that conforms to the Slashdot groupthink. Go read any non-geek book or simply go outside. You'll get nothing but the same-old same-old from this crowd
well, where to start? no matter, we ALL know who they are, despite their .constaNT spew over the airwaves procullaming yOUR great fortune to be their own personal doing/gift to US?
stay clear of these foulcurrs as the big flash occurs, as you would not want to get any of that unprecedented evile stuff on you?
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... get ready to brighten up?
the badtoll continues? the creators' planet/population rescue, & newclear power mandates, will be fulfilled.
has anywon tried robbIE's gnu 'dating' service yet?
mynuts won, happy gnu year?
And I have to agree with those bashing Robert Jordan, even though I haven't read his latest pile of crap. WoT is a series that started out so amazingly good, then was ruined by its author. It's his maddeningly slow pace, and more importantly, the fact that every single one of his female characters (except perhaps Min) is an arrogant b!tch. They're all extremely annoying, some more so than others.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions - Ben Mezrich
Amazon link
I'm looking forward to the long version of New Spring, due early January.
It's the first of the prequels jordan is writing - Starting with Rand's birth on Dragonmount.
Hopefully it'll let Jordan stop getting lost in his own threads for a while.
Personnally, my favorite book of the year would have to be this one. Da Vinci Code is a thriller / detective book that's absolutly brilliant.
What I think makes it better than other books of it's genre is that the story is based on real facts. This particular book is about Da Vinci's work and religion in general.
I've since read Dan Brown's other 3 books and they are all quite good. While they're not as good as Da Vinci Code, they are still quite good. If you've read DVC, you might want to check them out.
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it. This book has changed my view of what a good thriller was.
IP Therefore I am.
As someone who's been prominently involved in RJ fandom for the last decade, I'd have to say...you're absolutely right.
I'd probably get up to book 7 on the "to read" list, just because of Dumai's Wells, but it's been a cereal-varnished-saucer sled ride from there.
(ObLink: 17 minutes of story after book 10 ends)
Best book published this year that I've read? Probably Brust's The Lord of Castle Black. Most of my reading this year has not been of books written this year, though. Best book I read for the first time this year? Probably either Gaiman's American Gods or Card's Ender's Game.
The Humblest Mollusk on the Net
Oh, and I'll get flamed for this, but I really liked Matrix: Revolution and ROTK..."Master and Commander" was good as well.
The sequel to Trainspotting starts off with Sickboy wanking it to Hillary and Monica by page 3. The characters are truly depraved and messed up. While not all of us are perfect, most of us slashdotters avoid the dregs of society and all their ills. It's good to get some insight to the book's underworld.
postmodernsideshow.com
There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time :P
I've read this series several times (generally right before a new book is about to come out, so I can have the full plot in mind) and I have to agree. It seems like all the Jordan fans I know agree as well. We all wait now until the new books hit the used shelf at the book store, and grab it at half price.
I'm re-reading them again right now actually, just because I got bored and wanted something to read. It's really, really sad, knowing what they are going to come to, since the first few books are just awesome. He's managed to create this incredibly intricate and believable world, and then proceeds to run all the characters into the ground (SPOILER:Morgase as a fraidy-cat servant?!:SPOILER) and spawn so many plot threads that he ignores entire major characters per book. And yeah, the several pages about a bath, or a bank of fog, or.... that gets kinda annoying too.
The sucker that I am though, I'm gonna finish reading the series as it comes out just because I want to know what happens. I can make some guesses, but he always seems to have a rabbit to pull out of the hat when you least expect it. :)
That's one thing I'll say about the series that is cool, I read over the WoT FAQ recently before starting reading again, and from the discussions in there and having read the later books already, it was truly amazing to me how early he had started laying down the plots that happen 8000 pages later.
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
I can't remember seeing any films, other than LoTR's, that really intrigued me this year past. There were lots that I saw, but none that really stand out. It's possible that I just don't remember anymore though, because that is becoming a constant state of affairs.
By Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
I haven't read a single book from this series that I didn't like.
I have read every one except the dune encyclopedia.
-
"Vengeance is fine," sayeth the Lord.
How about Decipher by Stel Pavlou?
I love Bill O'Reilly, but his book was just not coherent in the sense of being able to make a cohesive argument. If he spent maybe another week or two on it, it might have come across as "interesting" instead of "profitable, thanks to fans".
;-)
Happily, I regifted it to a faux friend
As someone who's been prominently involved in RJ fandom for the last decade, I'd have to say...
Dude, I don't believe I'da told that.
I don't like it either. His books are light and entertaining, but his stories get a bit weak in places and babble a bit -- you don't really need to pay attention.
"In the Beginning was the Command Line" was some of his most clear prose on the most unclear subject matter. I recommend reading it, just to restore/gain some respect for him.
My advice, try harder. Obviously you've only read the first chapter or so, since it's almost the only part of the book where haikus occur. I typically take a long time to get into books, and it was the same with Cryptonomicon, but it was definitely worth it. Reading a few pages and then quitting doesn't sound to me like "trying".
I agree. Book #9 was sort of a high point - it was at least as good as the first five, and the ending was great. But 6-8 was insufferable. And I've not even bothered to try #10. When people you know who liked 6-8 tell you its boring and monotonous...
Fiction: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Non-Fiction: Masters of Doom by David Kushner
by Terry Goodkind
While this wasn't the best book of the series, it did explaing a lot from previous books and it was a good story.
This is another series that has yet to disappoint me.
-
"Vengeance is fine," sayeth the Lord.
DISCLAIMER: I haven't read it, but based on the genre, it has to be up there...
Either of the LeBron James "instant biographies".
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
right in Jordons bank account.
Jordon: proof the paying per word is wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No. Read a couple of his books. Truly couldn't tell the difference between the two - same plot, characters, endings (actually lame excuse for an ending). But, this is /. - we will be hunted out and
sent guantanamo for reprogramming.
-k
Your mind moves quicker than a nun's first curry. - A. Rimmer
'Real Facts' and 'Religion'. So it's a comedy, right? ;)
I'm sorry, but the stuff Moore puts out has to go in the same category of books that Ann Coulter and her cronies write.
I don't know if it came out in 2003 but I though King Leopolds ghost was great. Mask of Anarchy but steven ellis was good also. My neice is going to Nigeria and I started reading all I could on africa, How De Body is another good book.
Hooo Son! This'uns a Hawg!
by Cory Doctorrow.
First there was Neuromancer.
Then Snow Crash took the reins.
"Down and Out..." is the next in the logical procession of futurist novels.
The world is run by ad-hocracies (basically, large groups of fans), everyone has computers in their brains, collaberation happens in the cerebellum, and crygenics is de rigeur.
Awesome, awesome book.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
i really liked darwin's radio ( a fewyears old, but i just go to it). it had a good plot and it kept me interested from the first chapter to the end. i also thought the take on evolution was rather interesting.
i also liked art of deception by mitnick on the non-fiction front. informative and it reinforces the belief that no matter how strong your passwords are if the people that have them can be convinced to give them out.
worst book i read was distress by greg egan. it wasn't a terible book, but it was the worst one that i actually read. while the plot was interesting, near the end it just seemed (imho) to end up being egan's rant on human sexuality and emotions.
probably would totally spazz out over fabrics and probably can sew, quilt, cross-stitch, make their own yarn outta goat's hair, develop patterns, etc.
programming competitions = quilting bees.
m.
ps on the subject, "google hacks" by Tara Calishain is worth it's $15 price tag. "Quimby the Mouse (ACME Novelty Library)" by chris ware owns... great to have that all collected in one piece.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. This book blew my mind. It's the story of a kid with Asperger's Syndrome written from his perspective. You get so lost in his head, the amazing complexity of his world and the techniques he's developed to cope with the people and situations around him, and then you are with him as he is forced out into the raw real world. Perdito Street Station by China Mieville was a strong runner up for me. I think both books are particularly well suited for geeks.
Worst book? I'm past the point where I waste my time with books that suck. I used to push through just to finish the book but now that I'm realizing that life is short I just close the book and move on.
I personally liked Quicksilver. Not as much as some of his others, but quite enjoyable, and darnit, I actually learned some history (if only Mrs. Hahn from 9th grade was only as dull as the expositional parts of this book!).
On the other hand, I was rather disappointed by Orson Scott Card's "Crystal City." First off, on a sheer size scale, I felt I got ripped off: 1/3 the number of pages, and text nearly twice the size means I'm getting a lot less book than Quicksilver, at only $2 less MSRP (good thing I get wholesale prices). Card has definitely aimed at a lower reading level too: Quicksilver could be a challenge to get through in parts, and when following it with Crystal City, I felt like it was Dick and Jane by comparison.
It's got a couple of somewhat disconnected tales of Alvin and the other folks learning to be makers, and it's entertaining for the most part, but it doesn't end, and it's straining the believability limits for me for a historical fantasy. "Red Prophet" is still one of the finest fantasies I've ever read, but at volume 6, I still don't think he's got his end in sight. We're probably looking at 3 or 4 more volumes before a solid conclusion.
Design for Use, not Construction!
"Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" by Cory Doctorow is a nice, short read. concept rich.
m.
I'm most definitely not a literature geek.. ..but if I was, I wouldn't be parading around the fact that I had read Neal Stephenson. His writing is absolutely awful on many levels, and cannot conceivably be counted in the literary works that a "literature geek" would read.
At least suggest something a bit unusual; for instance, when was the last time anyone mentioned Dante's _The Divine Comedy_? I've purchased the books with the companion commentary by Dorothy L. Sayers. The Comedy itself is well written, the commentary is excellent, and it makes for enjoyable reading even for a non-"literature geek" such as myself.
No.
Choice quotes from The New Republic's review of Quicksilver:
Oh my personal pet peeve are authors that like to hear themselves talk. There is nothing like reading a book about a professor's life that is compared with the Cold War.
.02,
I read My Cold War ahead of time. It was not only unbearably boring I actually felt sorry for the students that this professor lectures to. I am sure he makes them read this novel for a better understanding of him as a person and why he grades them poorly when they tell him that his book sucks.
The rest of his books (listed here on his website) are mostly about music. I am quite confused why he just didn't stick to that genre. He seemed to be putting out quite a few, someone must have been buying them.
He actually mentions in this book that the reason he wrote it was because he couldn't find it in his heart to continue the research/writing for the actual book he was writing and he needed to "find himself" with this one. Great, nothing like reading the book that an author used to fill time in his life.
Two things to be learned from this rant: a) don't take classes with professors that require readings from their own books and b) only you and your family give a flying rat's ass about your life (unless you are famous), don't write about it even if you somehow think you can link it to your line of research.
Just my worthless
You get to the last book of a dekalogy only to realize that the author sucks.
:-) In fact quite true. It's just that I thought the first few books were really good, and like a good junkie "first hit is free", felt that I had invested too much time to just give up, and hope that there may be some salvagable stuff. And to be fair, there are a few good moments in the later books. Last chapter in book 9 in particular. Dumai Wells, as someone else suggested, is another good point. It just seems as though Jordan thought "there are about 200 Aes Sedai in the tower, and I will not stop writing until I name them all." There are some web references (google Encyclopedia WOT) that name all the characters, and there are like 1500 NAMED characters in the book. It's hard to keep track.
Fair enough.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
It's the owners manual to the United States Constitution.
Awesome series of books about the Royal Navy during the 1800's. Highly recommended.
Good story, good characters. Nice fantasy setting. Succeeds in not being a LOTR clone. And Eddings keeps it fast. No dragging of feet like Stephen King or Tolkien, both of wich seem to subscribe to the motto of "Why use a paragraph where a page will do?".
I have 4 liberals and 3 conservatives, before I get flammed for not being fair, let me add another dumb political pundit conservative book :
Michael Savage : The Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture
- sigs are for wimps.
I 2nd "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime."
Of the Books I have read this year this was my hands down favorite.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Frankly, I wasn't impressed by Quicksilver. Of course it didn't have an ending, typical of a Stephenson book. Then again, it's only book one of a trilogy, so nobody expected one.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Best:
Golden Age, Phoenix Exultant, and
The Golden Transcendence by John C. Wright.
Mind you, I also want to beat him for the wealth of interesting ideas he throws at you, each one of which could be a book in it's own right. On the surface it's space ioera, but there is more there...
meh:
DaVinci Code et al... by Dan Brown. Not great, but passable. Cotton Candy for the brain. Reminded me a lot of Clive Cussler.
Worst:
Anything by Michael Chrichton. As someone clever once said (not me) just because he made another book does not mean they have to make it into a movie.
The Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert
I'm just going to pretend this and the rest of the poorly written spawn of Frank's legacy don't exist. And don't think I didn't try to love them, I did.
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
During Neil Gaiman's /. interview, he recommended very highly a book by M. John Harrison called "Light".
Wow -- amazing book. Fabulous ideas -- true science fiction that breaks through our conventional understandings of science without losing all credibility.
But Harrison killed it. It makes my worst list because of what it could have been. Instead of a rebirth of the sci-fi genre, it's a book full of gratuitous vulgarity. I'm not going to be shocked by a few bad words, but I am turned off by their mindless and endless repetition. Sure, sex can be a nasty business. And death is rarely pretty. And he did have an interesting take on the ugly sides of cloning and nanotechnology. But after a while, it gets tired to read scene after scene of sordidness. In detail. He captured the mood well, but then exploited the mood by describing each little bit of nastiness. Why did he feel the need to pad his story this way? I don't know. But it seems to be a common fallacy among "serious" young writers that they have to go out of their way to be crude and revolting or critics won't take them seriously.
Okay, so who's word are you going to take on this one? Neil Gaiman who praised the book highly? Or the word of a two-bit hack. Seriously, the book is worthy of being read for its ideas, but as a work of literature it stinks.
Q: Is LoTR really based on Christian Mythology?
A: Yes. Tolkien wanted to demonstrate that even the mentally and physically challenged were capable of success and that therefore we should love everyone, regardless of their defects.
Q: So who represents the mentally and physically challenged?
A: Well obviously the hobbits are the physically challenged ones here, but the central mentally challenged figure is Gandalf, responsible for the most horrible attack plan in literature.
Q: What's so horrible about a poorly armed team of two hobbits infiltrating Mordor?
A: Well, basically it ignores the fundamental strengths of the forces of light. Anyone who's played C&C or Warcraft knows that if you have an advantage in air units, you have to use it. Remember that elves can ride eagles, and that elven archers are incredibly potent - early on, Gimli dismounts a Nazgul with a single shot! With about a thousand eagles (given elven archers on each one), the forces of good would have matched up pretty well in the air against Mordor's air units: all nine of them. While the leader of the Nazgul cannot be killed by any living man, this does not prevent a team of twenty eagles from tearing him to little shreds, especially if Gandalf rode along for help. So basically an air battle would have been brief unmitigated slaughter of the Nazgul as about a thousand eagle-mounted elves blew them out of the sky in a hail of arrows.
Q: But I thought that there was some other book that said that the eagles wouldn't help?
A: We're not talking about some other stupid book here, we're talking about the Lord of the Rings. And in this book, the eagles most definitely help out, first by flying Gandalf off the tower and secondly by pitching into the Final Battle in full force, attacking ground units (stupid!) at great risk to themselves. So obviously they would have been content to take part in a brief airborne slaughter of the Nazgul.
Q: Ok so you defeat all Mordor's air units... then what?
A: Well with air superiority, you command the skies. Which means that you can fly right over Mount Doom and drop anything you want right in there... like a ring. Mordor only had nine airborne units, and with them out of the way Mordor has absolutely no way to prevent anyone from flying anywhere.
Q: But the ring would corrupt the eagles trying to drop the ring in, silly.
A: Actually, the ring can only corrupt those who touch it or those in the nearby area. This is a trivial mechanism to defeat. The first step is permanently bind the ring to a weak and helpless creature, like a rat. Second step is of course to put the rat on a long rope, so that the creature holding the rope is out of the sway of the ring. Then the eagle carrying the rope, having total air superiority, flies over Mount Doom and drops the rat in the volcano. An utterly trivial victory.
Q: Ok, so why the elaborately stupid attack plan? Why send the physical rejects as the only hope of mankind?
A: The lesson is that, though they succeed at great cost and great risk, they are still capable of success. This, of course, was the lesson of the Holocaust - that we should never feel so superior to the weak or inferior that we decide they have no place. Even idiot tacticians like Gandalf and weak, pathetic creatures like Hobbits can add some value here & there.
Q: Wait a minute. I just saw the movie, and there's this scene where they're like "this is the last stand of the Men of the West", and all the men of the west are white, and they face of in total war against Indians on Elephants and "black orcs" (er... maybe we just call them "blacks" for short) and the white Men of the West achieve a total genocidal victory. Doesn't that invalidate what you just said?
A: Well, um, no. That's all fine & good, but remember that in the Holocaust we were committing g
This may have qualified for the previous year's award, however since I'm not really impressed with the comments here, Yann Martel's Life of Pi is one of the best books I've read in a while. I recommend it to all.
The really effective way to do it (used by a number of SF writers, including Heinlein in "Starship Troopers") is to leave race entirely ambiguous until the end. In other words, get people to for a complete opinion of the character and then let them in on the race.
The cake is a pie
Above is right on. R.J. is milking the series for all he cn get. If there was ever a gameplan or logical ending, he has long since thrown it out. As long as we keep buying it, the soap-opera will continue.
The question is not "Will this end in my lifetime?" but rather "Will he finish it in his?"
What, for "Most overhyped halfway decent suspence novel"?
The cake is a pie
Aside from the settings, the history in the book is a rehash of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" which, aside from being poorly researched, was based on the rantings of a loon who was forced by the courts to admit he made the whole thing up.
And the villian at the end?!?! There were too many inconsistencies in resolving it.
Fiction: Life of Pi by Yann Martel was without a doubt the best book I read this year.
Nonfiction: Confessions of a Tax Collector : One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS
by Richard Yancey. Okay, I'm cheating here because I think this won't be released until '04--but my friend snuck me a publisher's advance copy and it blew my doors off.
slashsearch.org - slashdot search. powered by google.
If you can get past the bleeding heart psychobabble, the underlying principles are actually really good. For example, try to schedule your priorities/to do's etc... week by week rather then day by day. The worse thing you can do is live by a daily to-do list. (there is more to it, but you have to read the book.)
You mean there's a book?!? Is it any good? I mean does it have all the cool fight scenes from the movie?
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
When I read Cryptonomicon, my experience went roughly like this:
First 500 pages: loved it.
500-800: grew increasingly annoyed as it became clear he had no idea where he was going with his story.
800-900: gradually started enjoying the book again
925: the book just sort of ended, sending me into an apopleptic fit.
I'm reading Quicksilver now, and I'm having a largely similar experience, although I got annoyed earlier this time.
I loved Snow Crash, and it ranks among my favorite books of all time, but it too is a deeply flawed book in some ways. Stephenson can be a brilliant writer at times, and he has tons of great ideas and an incredible eye for detail, but he just seems to lose control of his books. It seems like he sets out to write them with a few cool images or scenes or characters in his head, and he never bothers figuring out how to tie them together into a plot that makes sense. Then, round about page 900, it's as if his publisher's gotten tired of waiting for a completed manuscript and forces him to finish, so the story just sputters out.
Consequently, you get these sprawling, wandering epics that eventually collapse under their own weight. Every once in a while you get a glimpse of the brilliant novel that might have been, but it's drowning under hundreds of pages of excess verbiage and gratuitous plot digressions.
It's frustrating, because the man is clearly a incredible writer. If he could just find the discipline to prune away some of the excess stuff that doesn't serve the story, he'd be one of the best novelists of our time. Given that Quicksilver is the the first 900-page installment in a three-part cycle, however, I don't think we can count on that happening anytime soon.
Monkeytreats
My wife started listening to King's Gunsliger Series in the car. Due to her talking about it I took the first four books(paper since I see audio books as something for after I have actaully read the books, for car drives and going to sleep), which us on Vaca as fluff reading(paperback = fluff reading, hardcover = Non-fluff due to weight of book). I had figured that a story bascially boiling down to a western wouldn't apeal to me (That and I have never read a king book before so I wasn't sure I'd like his style)...I was toally surprised, these are damn good books, and it actually makes me interested to read them (something few books do lately, perhaps I am tireing of Sci-Fi Fantasy)...I am in the middle of Wizard and Glass nw, and its shaping up to be as good as the rest, and I am hurriedly trying to get through it so I can red Wolves of Callah(sp?) the next book which my wife has promised (but is getting itchy) to not start on audiobook till I catchup.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Bitter EJB by Brute Tate et al. IMHO fills an enormous gap in the J2EE world by daring to suggest that EJB might not be the best technology for all enterprise software projects everywhere.
Its well written, broad (but not overly), and can be read non-sequentally. I wish more books took this approach.
Amazon
How I Saved Censorware.org
But I've got to vote for my mother's books. She discovered POD (Print On Demand) publishing this year and published 5 novels, three of them being a trilogy starting with "Stones for a Crumbling Wall".e tail.asp ?isbn=0-595-26582-0
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_d
Iuniverse is quite generous with their "browse before you buy" which allows you to read the entire book.
Absolution Gap 'completed' the loose Inhibitors trilogy started in Revelation Space and continued in Redemption Ark.
Set in the future, several hundred years from now, humanity lives off world due to an iceage that has set in, and split up into several groups. Unknown to them, a force that lives between the stars has spotted them and begun its never ending task - that of supressing space faring species.
The first two books were fantastic, they told the story really well, and built believable characters out of figures that you at first dispise in some cases. The storyline is disjointed in someplaces, with some scenes skipped altogether, but it is done in such a fantastic way that you hardly notice, with the jumps doing more to move the story along than to distract from it.
Unfortunately, Absolution Gap, the final book in the series, fails to deliver. The entire book is building up to a conclusion that really never happens, and the entire arc is wrapped up after the end of the story, in an epilogue that makes you feel as tho you have been cheated. In all, the book feels like it was too long, and the author decided to jsut give up. The entire premise of the book, and one which you would buy the book on, is that there is a massive climax to the story arc that has taken two books to build up, but in reality you come away feeling cheated, because the climax never happens. None of the characters you care about are expanded, indeed several are killed off, and everything you think is going to make a difference jsut whithers away. The story just is not ended at all. Its like watching the first two films in the LotR trilogy, and then finding out they decided not to make the third, but to finish it off in a two page pamphlet included with the second film.
I really liked A. Reynolds based on his past work, but this book really makes me want to give up reading him. He just did not deliver the goods, and if I could get a refund for my time taken reading this pile of crap, then I think I would. Sorry guys, definately my Worst Read of the year.
My vote for the worst book of the year would be the vaporware novel Feast of Crows by George R. R. Martin. This was scheduled for release last spring, then it was moved to september. Well We're still waiting. The series has been awsome to date but I tend to worry if he's gonna manage to finish the planned seven books in his life.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679 763309/103-9417197-6812639?v=glance by Dr. Kay Jamison Redfield. Dr. Redfield is a Professor at John Hopkins
Some quotes from the book:
- "We all move uneasily within our restraints."
- "but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did."
- "The morbidity of my mind was astonishing: Death and its kin were constant companions."
-"Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right be considered a "successful" suicide.....
- There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as "successful" and "unsuccessful" to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who "fail" at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
The best relatively new author on the scene is George RR Martin. I'm eagerly awaiting the next volume of his series.
The only downside of his books is that he tends to follow too many characters at once. For three books now, there is a thread about dragons, but none of the characters from that thread have interacted except in minor ways with anyone else.
Other than that, the plots are amazing and everything holds together. The writing is top-notch and all the books were page-turners.
http://www.georgerrmartin.com/
So far I've *mostly* read two books that I thoroughly enjoy:
;) ) of the Bible. (As mentioned by a previous poster. ;) ) Besides, 40 chapters of mindless drivel about all types of topics that the Bible is much more capable of handling on its own (because it does), and in more depth than Rick Warren does, seems like a waste of time to me. I skimmed this book and found that reading his little blurbs of 3 sentences each at the end of each chapter completely captured the drivel of each chapter in full. And if you happen to go to a Christian church and they happen to be using this book across all sectors of the church, make sure you know what this book is about before you decide to commit yourself to enduring it's lengthy drivel.
1. Enemy at the Gates - Yes, the book that the movie was based upon. However the movie (I believe - haven't seen it yet) deals with a very small (but important) portion of the overall battle. Very gripping details of the mundane soldier's life in battle to the grandiose schemes of Hitler and Stalin. Very good.
2. AI Application Programming - While this is meant to give any programmer the basics for how to program AI code that works in software, I find it to actually be a good overview w/ source code of the various AI research areas out there right now. Pick it up if you're ready for some thinking, but be forewarned, the author uses C only. Maybe not the best choice for AI programming in general, but it's still quite readable.
One book I wouldn't recommend:
The Purpose Driven Life - While I don't have any major theological issues with Mr. Warren's writing style, I found this to be a rather simplistic, and therefore dumb, book. You'll find much more depth and thought provoking reading going through the Old (or New Testament
and close dodwn the Books section, no one cares about these shitty books that are posted about. Also, while your at it close down *BSD and Apple too, since no one wants dead filth or homosexuals. Thanks.
Considering the fact that there's such a delay between books, and the fact that some of the recent books appear to have been editted and re-editted and re-re-editted so that the storeline doesn't quite jell out, I'd have to say that the blame for the downhill turn has to rest on the publisher.
The publisher sets the release date, they go through and make changes (pull this chapter here, put it there, etc.) and then of course the author gets blamed for it. Frankly, I sometimes wish the publishers would butt out and let the proven authors proceed at their own pace and publish stories as-is.
But of course that'd make sense...but won't make people as much money, so we all know what really matters to publishers.
Grei
Yann Martell picked up a Booker Prize for this gem. Warning: Not geeky at all--Pi is the main character's name, not a mathematical constant. Just a great story about a guy trapped at sea in a lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
I ROCK
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Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan would make the top of my fiction list for 2003. Starts a bit slow, but I still read it in one night. The basic premise is that rich enough people can digitize their consciousness and travel, or be reincarnated, by just transferring the "stack" to a new human "sleeve". But the fun moments are really the details like self aware hotels, catholics as a small right-to-die sect, outdated robots running gun shops etc. A bit over the top in places, but it hangs together pretty well.
My suggestions (not in any order)
Best:
Religion/Philosophy
"The Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard, able to rile up the pharasees in any denomination (lots of fun to watch).
"A Theology of the New Testament" by George Eldon Ladd, A well presented, simple, consistant theology that is equally hated by those on the ultra conservative and ultra liberal wings who san "yes the bible sys that but.."
"The Purpose Driven Life" by Rick Warren. A Little simplistic, but makes good points.
Political:
"A National Party No More" - by Zell Miller. If the (national) Democrat Party would read this they might have a chance to regain their popularity.
Fiction:
"Eragon" - Just in time for the Tolkien revival.
"The Time Travelors Wife" - Fun exploration of time travel paradoxes, light reading.
Worst:
Fiction:
"The Davinci Code" - Just shows you can build bad fiction on long discredited forgeries.
History:
"Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas" - Unbelievable fiction when written becomes the topic of scholarly discussion. Now you know what will happen to all those bad star wars and star trek novels 1700 years from now.
"The Gospel of Mary Magdelene" - As above.
Political:
"Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" - A Comedian who made his reputation insulting everything pretends that spilling his bile on politics should be taken seriously.
"Dude, Where's My Country" - A movie producer who writes scripts for scenes in documentaries and makes up things to put in them pretends he understood reality to begin with.
Of course, this is all up to taste.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
No way. If I ever read a book, it was by accident.
you totally wrong, in this book, time actually doesn't slow down, it simply reverses. theres about mabey 1/6 of the book that deals with events that happen after book 9 seems the other 5/6th is every one wondering whats rand is doing at the end of book 9.
i really expected the series to pick back up after book 9, i mean (spoiler.............. rand cleanses saidin) you expect shit to explode after that , DO torturing forsaken for failure, large battles taking place, how about a huge ass party in the black tower? something come on
All I can say about Quicksilver is that it is tedious and unfocused. You could have easily pulled 200+ pages out of this and told a compelling story. Neal - hire an editor who isn't in awe of you.
Well, it's really an older book series, but since the paperbacks only came out in the USA in 2003, I will put forward the most refreshing and amusing books I've seen in a while, The Eyre Affair and its sequel Lost in a Good Book by Jasper FForde.
/.ers heart (which I can't reveal as it is a spoiler.)
A marvelous alternative Britain where everybody is highly literate, and our heroine, Thursday Next, is a Special Operations officer in the LitraTec (Literary crimes) division.
Alas, the latest one, The Well of Lost Plots, can't be recommended quite as highly, even though it centers on a concept near and dear to the
As an unabashed and yet notoriously picky (read: pain in the ass to buy for) sci-fi fan, here are a few of my favorite books of 2003.
I just finished China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and I am flabbergasted. Mieville's city-state of New Crobuzon is utterly fantastic and his clarity of vision for his world, in my opinion, is the kind you only come across once in a great while. I will most certainly be picking up his newest novel, The Scar , as soon as I finish a couple of books curently in my queue.
I was delighted that in the last year (or perhaps a little bit more), the great Samuel R. Delany's books have begun coming back into print. Three of his novels, Dhalgren , Nova and the duplex Babel-17/Empire Star , along with his short story collection Aye, and Gomorrah... and other stories are all truly wonderful sci-fi. If you decide to read him, start with Aye, and Gomorrah..., Babel-17/Empire Star and then Nova; when you think you have a handle on him, tackle Dhalgren. Tackling Dhalgren is no easy task, but the journey is completely worth it.
Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow now has two books in print ( Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and A Place So Foregin and Eight Mor e) and a third on the way. Both books (a novel and a short story collection respectively) showcase a writer I am quite sure we'll be seeing a whole lot more of in the future. Doctorow's writing reads very much like the first writer of the next generation of sci-fi writers; you won't be disappointed.
Cyberpunk poster boy William Gibson also had a new book this year, Pattern Recognition . As his writing pressed forward, Gibson has slipped further and further from futurity into today, creating science fiction that happens in today's world. His latest work is an interesting story of Cayce Pollard, a cool-hunter with a severe allergy to brands. The story is, as with all things Gibson, tightly written and as focused as a laser beam on its subject. A great read for all.
I sure hope this helps. I know not all the books came out specifically in 2003, but I read them all in 2003 (along with countless others) and I think that's close enough for me to sneak them in.
James Frey: A Million Little Pieces
A memoir dealing with the author's time in rehab. Very, very raw. Extremely inventive writing style.
Colin Dexter: Train
Set in the 50's, Dexter weaves the lives of a cop, the wife of a murder victim, a black caddy and his friend in a decidedly creepy way. Bagger Vance this ain't.
Paul Auster: Oracle Night
When a book takes over your life. This modern-day fairy tale shows off auster's flair for the...well, the odd. Auster use footnotes to tell two stories at a time...it's kinda hard to describe, but it works.
I'm sure there are more, but I've gotta head to work.
Triv
Quicksilver was a disaster of writing and editing.
My other quip with Stephenson is how pseudo-intellectual the books are. Okay, the "CS for idiots" in Diamond Age was bearable, but all of this "degree in a can" low-brow history/science is tiresome for those of us who have it from original sources.
I tend to gravitate towards pretty "literary" works and not so much genre fiction, so its hard to come up with a book I think is great that will also appeal to the average slashdotter (not a knock, just a sociological observation). Anyway, Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude is a great piece about growing up in Boerum Hill Brooklyn in the 70s. And it also has a lot of discussion about comics (much like Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon), which is where is enters the realm of topics covered on /.
"the starry sky above and the moral law within"-Kant
The fact that so many people lauded this airport-bookstore drivel tells me just how low-brow the reading audience has become. From the mindless cliff hangers (resolved in three pages for the idiots who can't track a plot) to the impossibly silly puzzles to the hocus-pocus Templar BS plot (which has been around for decades)...I kept looking for the "Nancy Drew" logo on the side of this "young readers" crap.
I actually understand dark energy now (or at least as far as a layperson can), and why recent news talked about the Universe being "open".
--- Ban humanity.
The Art of Deception, by Kevin Mitnick.
Ok, the copyright date on my copy says it was published in 2002 (must have came out **late** in 2002, or my memory is really going, as I could have sworn I haven't had this book a year...), but I didn't read it until this year... anyway, it's one of my favorites and definitely gets a vote for "Book of the Year."
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Stop by the Walden Books in your local airport for some other great drivel to sit aside Da Vinci code on your shelf. You might like the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys series as well - the mysteries are about as complex as the moronic tripe in the Da Vinci Code.
It tops the best seller lists every year
... (Guinness Book of Records)
Nothing beats it
World sales of the Bible are more than 100 million every year.
The Bible is the best-selling book every year. If sales of the Bible were included in best-seller lists, it would be a rare week when anything else would achieve a look in.
above text from http://www.sm3a.org.uk/messengers/bible.html
. It has been estimated that between 1815 and 1975 some 2.5 billion copies of the Bible were printed
Concerning Ender's Game, the first half of that book was published as a novella in the seventies, IIRC. As such, it was a masterpice. The addition of the second half of the book worked pretty well, and Speaker for the Dead raised some interesting issues. Avoid everything after Speaker. IMO, Card is at his very best in short stories.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Or it could just be that his writing has gone downhill so far that the publisher is trying desperately to put together something that makes sense. R.J. wouldn't be the first author to lose it as he aged and even a great publisher can't cover it up forever.
Doesn't count.
DDB (who would gladly chip in a few $ in taxes to enable us to land a Bigfoot rover on Mars)
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
See, I've often picked up this book after seeing all the stickers on it for the awards it's gotten, etc., but then I always put it back down. It seems the universal praise is: "And get this ... he's on the boat with a tiger! Isn't that wild? What a gripping story!"
And yet, this doesn't sound all that "gripping" to me. It sounds like a story of limited scope that takes place in a single, mostly featureless setting. It doesn't sound like it has much characterization, based on the fact that it only has one character in it (plus tiger). Not to mention the fact that the idea of being in a lifeboat with a tiger sounds, well, a little ridiculous -- your typical "literary author's" contrivance.
What's so good about it?
Breakfast served all day!
Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc by Arthur I. Miller
An incredible book (although released in 2002) that features these two revolutionary characters developing simultaneously in very similar circumstances.
Most amazing is the comparisons of how each interprets space and time and how they apply this interpretation to their science/art. It becomes apparent that both Einstein and Picasso were working on the same basic problem.
I'm re-reading them again right now actually, just because I got bored and wanted something to read. It's really, really sad, knowing what they are going to come to, since the first few books are just awesome. He's managed to create this incredibly intricate and believable world, and then proceeds to run all the characters into the ground ...
I would recommend "The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List" as a good reference for finding alternatives. It's really a fantastic resource (it's where I found "A Song of Fire and Ice"). I stopped reading the WOT when it seemed to cross from "great series" to "author's pension plan".
Although they came out in 2002 the paperback versions debuted in 2003.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel. My favorite this year. What a fantastic book. It's no wonder many colleges and universities are incorporating it into their required reading cirriculum. An Indian boy becomes lost at sea after a ship he was riding on sinks. His only passenger in the lifeboat - a Bengal tiger.
Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. Written by the same author of The Virgin Suicides. It's a story about a Greek girl (boy) born as a hermaphrodite in a Greek family and her experiences growing up in that environment and that condition. Won the Pulitzer I believe.
Books rock. They are soooooo much better than the tripe offered on t.v. BTW, is anybody else offended that TLC stands for The Learning Channel? There's nothing learning about that channel anymore. Just Trading Spaces and the umpteen variations on that theme.
Actually, I think it's just the opposite. The first few books came out at fourteen-month intervals, but the reason for the extension is lies with Rigney, not with the publisher. I believe that the interval was first extended with Lord of Chaos, which was badly overdue. At this point, I really don't think that Rigney's work can be edited without his express consent. Kind of like Stephen King. We're getting WOT "at (his) own pace" and published "as-is". No self-respecting editor would go along with the last couple of WOT books unless forced.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
A friend of mine introduced me to "Sex, Time and Power" by Leonard Shlain, and whether you agree with this guy (who's the Chief of Laparoscopic Surgeon at California Pacific Medical Center), he'll definitely make you think about the ultimate cause - how evolutionary biology shape modern human's gender roles, sexuality and behaviors. It touched upon so many concepts and tied them up to a theory that he proposed as the ultimate factor in human evolution that made Homo Sapiens 150k years ago. Perhaps the most shocking thing is when I see myself in some of the behaviors he described that I thought were wel thought-out "mating strategies", but are in fact I'm just following um..mostly instinctual drives. Definitely made me think as much as any book I read this year.
If he was going downhill, I can't see them comissioning a prequel to the series. And yet there's talk of a prequel in the works.
Grei
I highly recommend 2 books: Fast Food Nation and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. As Greg Palast of the former book says, buy it from Amazon.com, a non-profit company (unintentionally).
Fast Food Nation might make you think twice about that Big Mac, and Best Democracy shows you the access and power of campaign donations.
was an excellent book. I read a bit, and this book was stunning on a number of levels. KSR's work has always been top notch, but this one is a departure in many ways, but NOT that way. it is a remarkable piece of work.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I'm a terribly disorganized person who always intends on creating a reading diary or using my cobweb infested blog to record what I read, but never does. So, most of these books are very recent reads or things I *think* I read this year, but may have been last year.
Biggest Disapointment: Quicksilver
Bought it the day it came out, read it with great enthusiasm. Hit the reference books and the Quicksilver wiki frequently and learned a lot about the period. Bogged through slower and slower. Now it is sitting beside my reading chair with a bookmark somewhere past the 3/4 mark. I'm going to finish it. Really.
Second Biggest Disappointment: The daVinci Code
Granted, it was a fun read (like about 2 hours), but overall it was waaay too Crichton-like: huge, earthshattering ideas compressed into a slapdash movie treatment with lots of chase scenes, action set pieces, and simplistic characters.
Most Eagerly Awaited No Show: A Feast For Crows
Best Fantasy: Fool's Fate
Great end to a great series and if Martin doesn't get some more stuff published, Robin Hobb is going to be my favorite fantasy author.
Current Overall Favorite Author: Terry Pratchett
Even though I didn't like Monstrous Regiment half as much as I wanted to. I did finally read The Bromeliad Trilogy and the Wee Free Men was great.
What I'm Reading Now: Perdio Street Station
About 1/3 of the way through and enjoying it immensely.
Also Read/Liked:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
To The Nines
Q is for Quarry
Shutter Island
Tricky Business (hey, it was funny)
The Honor Harrington Series (not great books, but I enjoyed them well enough to read them all)
Flashman (been meaning to read that for a long time)
Master and Commander (ditto)
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
I found Quicksilver to be painful to read. For instance, a significant character dies in the middle of the book, only to be replaced by his brother. Piffle and Rot!
Stephenson's writing has been uneven, to be sure. The Diamond Age is another that let me down. Cryptonomicon was great, as was Snowcrash, but hey, we all can't be Stephen King, now, can we?
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Into the nipples?
;-)
Haven't you ever played "Periscope"?
Breakfast served all day!
Enjoyed the Neil Gaiman penned Endless Nights, as well as the various Fables graphic novels, written by Bill Willingham: Legends in Exile and Animal Farm.
Joss Whedon's Fray is also out in trade paperback.
For the more superhero-minded, the Busiek/Perez JLA/Avengers teamup is great (still one issue to go, though). And Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross is certainly a pretty pretty book.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
The New Financial Order by Robert J. Shiller argues a way to remake modern economies as we know it by HEDGING THE WHOLE ECONOMY! Imagine if all the risks and shocks of our economy be cushioned by modern risk management techniques on a global scale, and you have a book that talk about such strange concepts as "profession insurance" to "inequality insurance" and "intergenerational social security". It's a must read for anybody who consider themselves at the cutting edge of modern thinking.
Foucault's Pendulum is much better.
Mod this parent up! Why *do* we need to rank things???
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
ok dudes and dudettes, i dont think the lord of the blings buisness was written this year? maybe the movie but movies arent books last time i checked. and alot of other boks mentioned werent written this year. but on the subject of the lord of the blings, hasnt anyone ever herad of the silmarillion? i think its actually better than the rest of the tolikien books and tolkien himself regarded it as his greatest work..
The entire wheel of time series is self-referential tacky cheeseball crap. Bad writing, inane plot, Jordan's a hack who hit on a niche.
I see LOTR mentioned in several posts. LOTR came out MANY MANY years ago. It can't be a 'best book of 2003' as it's not 'of 2003'. This would be like calling Casablanca the movie of the year.
mogorific carpentry experiments
In no particular order (And probably none of these books were written this year, oh well):
Life of Pi - Yann Martel: A fantastic book dealing with a little boy on a boat with a tiger. Starts off a bit slow, and for a very long time you aren't really sure where it is heading, but stick with it because the last fifty pages or so are breathtaking. Probably the most thought provoking ending in a book this year.
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Basically a book looking at all the different types of love. Healthy love, obsessive love, unrequited love, family love, etc. Marquez has a typical fantasy-reality style which really works in this book (Imagine people buying a dozen roses for their lover and then eating each one because they love them too much)
Infinite Jest - DF Wallace: A mind job. Extremely dense, this book has 1,000 'normal' pages and an extra 100 pages of footnotes that must be read. Hundreds of characters, tens of plot-lines, no real resolution or plot or point, this book is amazing. The joy is in the characters and the writing, which is phenomenal. Classic first line: I am in a room surrounded by heads with bodies. Beautiful stuff.
Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco: This book is smaller than Infinite Jest, but just as dense. The author is a phenomenally smart man, and it shows throughout this book. He makes thousands of throaway references to obscure medieval places, events, and people, and it all matters. Trying to keep your head around the plot as it spirals out of control is half the fun. Probably the ultimate conspiracy book ever: It ties everything that has ever happened together. What more could you want?
Blindness - Jose Saramago: Saramago is a gifted writer. Everything he writes is so lyrical and poetic, metaphors and symbolism just drips from his pen onto the page. Blindness has a killer plot: For no reason, people are going blind. And it is contagious. An interesting study on humanity, Saramago focuses more on the philosophical side of everyone going blind than the potential hack doomsday plot which perhaps a lesser writer would have chosen. Be warned though, Saramago uses massive paragraphs, little punctuation, and nobody has a name. Once get used to the style, it flows perfectly, but it may provide a stumble to some.
And there you have it. A few of my favourites, give them a try, they are all amazing.
Also, while Moore is obviously anti-Republican, he's not by any means complimentary about the Democrats either
His criticisms of Democrats is the same type of token critisms of Republicans O'Reilly throws out once in a while, just to seem more fair or "independent".
Don't be fooled into believe these tricks.
- sigs are for wimps.
if I want to be shouted down by useless morons who can't tell the difference between the truth and a lie, I could work at Fox News - since I don't enjoy being sucked into arguments with morons (they bring you down to their level and beat you with experience) I don't see the point in it.
Besides, if I knew stocks (or could fake knowing them), conjecture would get me a lot of places...like Darl McBride's speed dial.
Michael Moore is a brilliant man. He has always brought something new to the table. Al Franken is not only intelligent but funny.
You sound like you are dismissing all political books as useless without actually reading them, because they do contribute new information. The information they contribute is in the DETAILS. For example, Al Franken refutes a lot of statements in Ann Coulter's and Bill O'Reilly's books as borderline libelous. It's that kind of discussion we NEED in the country, especially if one side is spreading false accusations. This discussion is not happening enough.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
...and it read like oatmeal strained to remove any element of flavor. It also seemed like a document written more for political reasons than to actually tell a story. I probably overgeneralized from that experience. Sorry.
* The characters feel similar to those in Cryptonomicon (another crazy Shaftoe, Daniel Waterhouse is akin to the main character from Crypto).
Close, but not strong enough. Apparently Stephenson was bored with the creative process and couldn't be assed to imagine new characters... so let's reissue a new Shaftoe and a new Waterhouse in a new era. Oh, and in case it wasn't clear enough that we are reusing the same characters lets bring back Enoch Root!
But of course there need to be characters that weren't in previous novels... how can Neal accomplish this without excerting any creative effort? Simple, just throw in a bunch of historical characters and make them do silly things. Dull moment in the plot? Hey look, Issac Newton's at the door. Getting bored are we? Let's chill with Ben Franklin! It's not interesting to read because there is nothing new here... it seems like he's competely given up on the creative process altogether.
* One of the hardest things to do right when there are parallel plotlines is connect them in a flowing and lucid manner. Cryptonomicon did an excellent job of weaving the past and present together. In Quicksilver, we get large chunks of uninterrupted narration, but there's very little context switching. This left me a little bored at times.
The problem with this style is not the style itself, but with how Stephenson executes it in this case. In Cryptonomicon I actually cared enough to keep reading the next page, but in this case it was tedious slogging through the pages. I'd put it down and pick it up again a few days later and it would keep jumping around and didn't ever allow me to build any sort of context. This in turn made me care even less which increased the time before I would try picking it up again, which made the context jumping even more painful, etc etc.
As you might be able to tell, I didn't finish the first volume, nor am I remotely interested in the next two. I'm just hoping that after he's done with this stupid "epic" he'll go back to writing books that are readable and interesting and contain characters who aren't simply reruns and references to historical figures. Because I really really liked his work in the past, and I'm bitter now.
501 Not Implemented
Actually, I'd nominate Quicksilver for worst book of the year. Sure, it has everything -- sex, adventure, politics, etc. -- but all this stuff is so jumbled, random, disorganized and pretentious that reading the book feels like nothing more than a tedious chore. At least Cryptonomicon had encryption in it. Bah.
>|<*:=
RJ needs a new editor, one that won't let his ego write crappy books.
It's like somewhere along the line, he forgets that he's writing a story, and thinks that he's writing a character study, or whatever.
It's obvious that he's trying to be a "world builder" like Tolkein, and that the Fantasy novel is all about the "world" but Jesus man, please just finish your story!!!
Little less conversation, little more action.
Ok, shoot me, mod me down, whatever you gotta do. I liked this book. Yes, I'm a 29 year old netadmin, and yes, it isn't cool to like this kind of stuff. But hey, I'm a freaking nerd.
I'm sorry, but the Harry Potter books are extremely well written, and are highly entertaining to read, even as an "adult".
Ok, I'm going into hiding now.
Actually, I found Snow Crash to be a bit of a dissapointment (having just read it this week for the first time). I'm not sure I'll read anything else by Stephenson (even allowing that it's probably one of his earlier works?).
It lacked polish and pacing. The plot had problems with maintaining tension or building to a climax. It was a lot of really neat scenes cobbled together. The ending was anti-climatic... when I got to the last page I wondered where the last chapter was. Not sure if the book needed to be twice as long (to flesh it out more), or if some parts shouldn't have been chopped to allow other sections to be fleshed out properly.
I could go into details, but it would be spoilerish (but I will if asked).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
There's always the Top 10 Books I Did Not Read This Year.
Having not been able to read too many books this year, it's not easy to make a well-founded proposal for the "best book" of the year. That said, I still think "Oryx and Crake" by Margareth Atwood was a real enjoyment to read! The dystopia presented in this book is described credibly, funny and though-provokingly, and in many ways it doesn't look as far away as one might think. The imagined consequences of ever-more-powerful international corporation, increasing public indifference and disillusionment, genetic engineering gone astray, terrorism and much-too-visionary nerd-geniuses are keywords in describing the world in which "Snowman" grows up - eventually to find himself the last human being on earth. Not often you see the author of a science fiction novel being a favourite for receiving the Nobel Price.
I really liked the "Bone Dolls Twin", it managed to be sad, creepy, and of a grand scale. The sequel is nearly as good, but the focus has moved on to court intrigue and the main character moving into a position of power.
Even if you hate "girl power" fantasy (like I do) you can enjoy these books. Despite the female protagonist and female author they do not fall into the "elves and unicorns crap", the "revisionist goddess worship pandering", or the "rainbow dragons flying out my ass" fantasy sub-genres that seem to make up 90% of the popular fantasy section of the bookstore
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
I flipped through some of Franken's book, have flipped through some of those books, and had the unfortunate experience of reading one of O'Reilly's books. I have not recovered yet.
> For example, Al Franken refutes a lot of statements in Ann Coulter's and Bill O'Reilly's books as borderline libelous. It's that kind of discussion we NEED in the country, especially if one side is spreading false accusations. This discussion is not happening enough.
When I flipped through Frankens book, I found a chapter dealing with him challenging another obscure pundit into a fist fight.
http://www.al-franken.com/excerpt.html#chap38
I'm sorry man, but these are the rantings and ravings of kindergarden politics. Who the hell cares what the unknown political pundit said about Democrats? Who the hell cares that Franken wanted to fight him?
These books are just red-meat for the true believers, they pander to their audience and provide no real intellectual discussion of politics. They are the equivalent of simplistic religious tracts, you see littered all over the place.
Did I already mention I don't like these books?
- sigs are for wimps.
All of the above posts are spot on, except they leave out the most excruciating part of the books: the "love scenes," wherin the female main character gets it on with every single male in a position of power over her. Offensive in the extreme, uninteresting, and thrown in every few hundred pages to keep the lowest of lowbrow interested in the plot. Awful. I just stopped a few hundred pages from the end because I was tired of enduring that shit.
Cthulhu loves you.
David Brin - Kiln People. Pretty damn clever way to write a detective novel - from the point of view of the cast-off "clones" of the main character that will die in a couple of days.
James Alan Gardner - Trapped. Far future sci-fi, set on a reconstructed earth, that turns out to be a Fantasy novel. (nano used as magic). And the 90-degree turn at the end that makes you question everything that's happened so far.
Sean Williams, Shane Dix: Orphans of Earth. Book 2 of a ultra-far-future space opera. Very well done, but you need to read book 1 first.
China Mieville - Perdido Street Station. Still working on it, as it's a dense book (600+ pages, small type, dense wording). I have no idea what genre this would be - Steampunk Fantasy, maybe? But he tells a compelling story, very descriptively, but without becoming "The Description of Shannara".
John Barnes - Candle. Not from 2003, but a nice finisher for his Resuna books.
Jack McDevitt - Engines of God. Another not-his-latest, but now having read 3 of his books, they all seem very similar anyhow. Well worth reading.
Warren Ellis - Planetary. Picked up Vol 2 this year, utterly fantastic. The "secret history" of a world with modern superheroes.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It seems this year I've only read books that are at least half a century old, as others have said, books do have a long shelf life, so check some of these out if you run across them.
...imagine a Beo.. seriously an interesting read ;)
Flatland - A Romance of Many Dimentions
this is a quite short book, easy to read in a day, and you can probably find it for $5 at B&N. While the mathematical aspects of the book are going to seem simplistic to anyone who's passed highschool geometry, the commentary on victorian societies is interesting.
Brave New World
One of my favorite books of all time, the dialoug can be a little hard to follow at times, but definity worth it.
Beowolf
Thus Spake Zarathustra
A great read for those interested in philosophy
The Prince
Another short book, handy if you ever become the ruler of a country
Critique of Pure *
A great series for those interested in philosophy
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
The story was mildly interesting. The whole "writing" thing is definitely not Mr. Brown's strength, however. His clunky phrasing made this a hard one for me to read.
The tinfoil-hat mystique, religious hoody-hoo, and the retardation of following a symbologist-stud around Europe is annoying, as well. I'd like to be the millionth to congratulate Mr. Brown on failing to emulate the suave of James Bond.
I could have forgiven it all if the writing was in the least decent.
HeinousJay (anonymous because I modded.)
Why, if I post AC then I can mod afterward, but if I mod then post AC, it undoes the mod? This makes no sense to me.
Lesson learned...
This guy is completely worthless anymore.
Slashdot: Liberal News for Nerds. Liberal Stuff that Matters.
R.A. Salvatores 2nd of the latest trilogy pits Drizzt Do'Urden vs lots of orcs! I am not a big D and D fan at all but I like the hack and slash nature =)
Ditto on that. The book is about an author who goes to the World Series of Poker to play and then report on the experience, with the idea that he would just report after he got knocked out. Turned out he got to the final table. Pretty comeplling stuff.
Havana is by far my favorite book that came out in 2003. And my most intensely unfavorite book of the year...well, I don't read shitty books, so I can't list one that really stood out.
I've been eyeing 'Ilium' by Dan Simmons for a while. Has anyone out there read this? Is it worth reading?
now I just wish the other 2 would come out here in the states.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Long story short: baseball thinking is dominated by longstanding rules of thumb, like the need to have a "clutch hitter" -- i.e., someone who can bat in runners on base when your team is down. Stats nerds who started looking seriously at baseball in the 1970s realized that a lot of these rules of thumb are flawed: among other things, it turns out that there is no such thing as a clutch hitter. The Oakland A's were the first team to use this information to build a contending team with a low-dollar payroll, and this book tells that story. Very interesting even if you aren't a hardcore baseball fan.
Light! Am I the only person who liked CoT? It gave EXACTALY what I wanted, more information on how the rest of the world reacted to the extreme amounts of channeling that was required to cleanse the OP and more information about what everybody else was doing at the time. Personaly I think that if RJ hadn't included these elements, you'd all be bitching about what he left out! Blood and bloody ashes people! Have you no patience? Don't try to rush the last battle, it will come when it will come.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
It doesn't really qualify as a 2003 book, but the movie is just coming out so why not... The book is strangely haunting. Much like Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. If the movie is half as good, it will be great.
Don
I was highly impressed with some of his work in the Hyperion series and had to pick this up when everyone else was clamouring over Quicksilver. From what I've read on this thread so far I made the right decision. At first the book felt a little like a rehashing of some of his other books, but it quickly became much more and expanded on some new ideas. Overall a very good read.
Nothing like using Stephenson's 900 page opuses to give your place that geek chic flair.
If you're interested in slightly more detailed descriptions of what I've read this year, you can check out my reading diary.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
is she is so damn good at what she does.Don't take it all so literally.You have to understand she is trying to get you.Hell she even pissed off the National Review just after 9/11 with;
"Invade their countries"
"Kill their leaders"
"Convert them to Christianity"
A beautiful statement in the face of the attack the only person with a better line was Karl-Heinz Stockhausen.(look it up)
Yeah liberals wanted to silence Ann Conservatives fired her.Stockhausen's Art-Fag peers wanted to institutionalise/lobotomize him.
(IMHO of course) The wheel of time books are getting slower and more tedious because Jordan wrote himself into a corner...
Reconcile the following:
1) The dark-one's prison must not be patched, it must be made whole again to the degree that it was never breached.
2) The only thing that can undo things and unmake things is Balefire.
3) When you Balefire something the timeline is rewound and replayed with the event removed.
So... Rand has to balefire the forsaken "hard enough" to unmake them far enough that the dark-one's prison was never opened (or possibly even never found).
Unfortunately, that would then prevent the breaking of the world and the third age would never have taken place.
This is a very unhappy Star Trek version of time paradox that leads to the "story that never happened". The way things are laid out now the story can not conclude.
The story is fixable, of course, if several things happen:
1) "The bore" is altered so that it is no-longer a hole cut into the dark-one's prison, but instead a tunnel around the structure of reality (sort of voice-over-IP style magical conduit) so that the dark ones prison was never actually breached. All of the references to the breach are simply declared deleberately apocryphal "because the forsaken were not so stupid as to tell anybody how they *really* accessed the dark one and his power."
2) A blanket means of cleaning up old enchantments needs to be introduced. Sort of a Bale-washing-up-fluid that can snuff out anything from sa-angrel to that golem thingy that can only be harmed by anti-magic. The diswater-of-fate then needs to be sudzed up to a nice foam and pored on the bore, the forsaken, and every piece of culendar (sp?) after it is all piled up on the dragonmount.
3) The FORSAKEN have to loose their SNIDLEY WIPLASH and his doomed dasterdly deeds flavor.
I mean seriously, the thirteen greatest mages (give or take) of the second age are unleashed on the third age with all of their lost knowledge of the "one power" and their access to the "true power" and the best thing they can come up with is sleeping their way into the bed/court of a queen?
The more detail Jordan provides on the actions and schemes of his villians, the DUMBER they look when the punk kids stumble into their plots and wreck them by apparently random action.
This is plot suicide.
At some point he has to stop digging the hole deeper and start digging a ramp out, otherwise we might as well just stop reading and start watching DragonBall-Z. It's got the same pointless escalation of power etc and you don't have to memorize a list of names...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Eragon, Harry Potter, Digital Fortress, Short History of Nearly Everything.
Pelé!
The wheel weaves what the wheel wills.. or in this case RJ weaves what RJ wills
There's also an interesting third-party discussion of Moore's response on kuro5hin.
Damn you, introducing *more* people to A Song of Fire and Ice?
:)
How am I supposed to find a copy of A Feast For Crows in the bookstore if there're so many people looking for it the moment it comes out?
Ian McEwan is one of those very rare authors who seems never to have written a bad word. He is a master of deep characterization and psychology, and Atonement is certainly his most ambitious and arguably his best book so far: a fine WW2-era historical novel, with engaging battle scenes and portrayals of life in wartime hospitals.
HaHaHa!
And they are serious! The irony!
Savage is a twit O'reilly a blowhard neither are acepted as "Conservatives"
But Ann on the otherhand is our anorexic intellectual SEX GODESS!
Al Gore failed to steal the election.
And despite all the talk from his camp...
All the unofficial after the fact liberal,commie,bedwtter,academic/journalist recounts favored BUSH!
There was NO scenario under which Gore won hence no stolen election
I definitly think Gibson's losing his wind, but I can't say I mind. The prose is still phenomenal, he's not blatantly leaving his books uncut, and the plots and essential characters are vaguely familiar, but still much loved.
Now I do have to acknowledge that Gibson's showing signs of running out of ideas. We've got another story about searching for a strange and mysterious anonymous genius of an artist, we've got another character named Case (although, granted now it's Cayce, and she's a girl), we've got a few other blatanly recycled characters.
But I honestly didn't mind. It's new Gibson for chrissakes. Jack it into my arm. I did really like CayceP's quirk about removing the brand names from all her clothing. Especially the bit about the levis logos having been ground off the fronts of the buttons on her new 501s by a confused chinese lock smith in NYC. I also really enjoyed the email and website stuff.
It's about the same Gibson, even with the supposed present tense. It's still a book containing two types of people, the inhuman rich and the raw talents. It's still got great toys and marvelously quirky characters.
It's fine with me that he's recycling old plots. So long as they still flow, and theyre still edited.
> michael moore wants oprah to run.
That just proves my point.
- sigs are for wimps.
For me CoT was the best WoT book. And when book 9 came out and everybody was whining that nothing happened I just couldn't stop reading and re-reading the descriptions of different cities and being amazed at the thousand small details that were just right.
The first books were about a fantasy world where some fantasy characters do amazing things. They were good, very good. But by now the story has evolved to being a history of a world where the characters are almost real. And to me this is the thing that sets WoT apart from the rest of fantasy.
Coulter is a french name, it must be so difficult for her to hate herself and love herself so much.
Is not that guns cause violence. Moore goes into Canada and apon noticing that Canadians have as much if not more weapons than Americans comes up with the conclusion that owning guns is not the problem. His conclusion was that violence was complex - everything from the attitude of the media to the attitude of the government contributes to the problem.
Too bad someone can't balefire the plot back to book five. That might help solve the problem some.
I gave up on the books. Too much to re-read to keep up with the so-called plot. Reminds me of when Paul Smith left the X-men and the plots went to crap about that time cause Claremont had to include every mutant known to man in the storylines.
"Mein Kampf" describes a place that could be 2003. Regardless, this is a fine work.
While I'm at it, try reading "Moldies and Meatbops" by Rudy Rucker. That one was compiled around 1997, but for some damn reason that one counts for 2003 too. Maybe because it's good.
Bone Mountain by Eliot Pattison. About as non-geek as you can get. A fugitive chinese political prisoner helping tibetan monks restore a diety to its rightful place. Great insights into tibetan spiritualism, culture and chinese occupation. Third book with same protaganoists, placed with the mystery genre but transcends it.
For comparison I also like Gibson and Stephenson and my usual recreational reading are simple mysteries.
What is a book?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Crossroads of Twilight was about 800 pages of women being bitchy at each other, and men bitching about women. I found it incredibly realistic!
Has anyone tried applying simple population dynamics to the plot twists in Wheel of Time? Will the number of plot twists eventually decline to zero, allowing the series to be concluded, or will it reach an equilibrium value, allowing RJ to write books forever? Right now the number seems to be growing exponentially...
- Smiley =)
"Never put off for tomorrow what can be avoided altogether"
By the way, to CmdrTostado:
I'm sorry they moderated you as 'Troll'. Some people can't seem to understand how someone can have views different than their own (or the mainstream).
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
The Myth of Homeland Security by Marcus J. Ranum. Shows the essential truth about homeland security.
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
I 3rd it - I have a son with 'mild' Asperger's. Nowhere near as bad as the protagonist of the book, but certainly I could recognize aspect of him in the character. It made my head hurt to view things from his perspective.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
My vote for best book of the year would be Jennifer Goverment by Max Barry.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson was the book I enjoyed the most this year. He did make a few mistakes and he does gloss things over but it's an excellent read for anyone that wants to know about most of the major scientific advances in the last 300 years and the people that have made them. For me the real strength of the book is the way he brings these people to life with his anecdotes and the fact that he makes the very important point of how incredibly little we know.
The best political book I have ever read is "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" by Robert H. Bork (1996). It is nothing like any of the current crop of political books. If you have any interest in politics, it is a must read.
Bork was nominated by President Reagan to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, and was turned down because he is conservative. If you are not conservative, don't reject this book out of hand.
Bork impressed me a lot, and I am not easy to impress. I am going to read his other books. Bork is a learned person and you will truly be informed by this book. Don't believe any negative reviews you may read about it. It is penetrating, informative, and pertinent. Bork changed my opinion. Two big thumbs up.
Believe it or not, I did the same exact thing. Waiting in anticipation for book four. Working down the top 100 list in the meantime.
Here is my list for the year Paris 1919 - how the treaty ending WWI shaped the 20th century. The rise of Nazism, problems in the middle east... Fast Food Nation - whoah McEvil empire How The Scots Invented the Modern World - the first literate society, without the baggage of the English class system What Went Wrong - The Clash Between Islam and Modernity - explains much of why the islamic world hates the west The Asassins - A Radical Sect in Islam - the origins of using murder as a political tool -
The iranian.com has an excerpt. Check it out.
Since I don't see a any comment crapping all ver this poorly written "book", I can only imagine that most readers have put it out of their minds. I only wish I could because it is a supremely forgettable book. It' so poorly written that I suspect that Tom Clancy had it ghost written and it went to press before _anyone_ had a chance to proofread it. Give this book to someone you don't like for Christmas. You can have my copy cheap.
Nope, you're not the only one. I managed to get through Cryptonomicon, but only barely. It would have been a great book if it was half the length.
The worst part of the whole book was the painful -- oh, so painful -- part about eating Captain Crunch cereal. What possessed the man to write that self-indulgent drivel? Sheesh, did he read some Ayn Rand the night before?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
A fairly decent bit of historical fiction.
You're not alone, Little Brother. I've been entertained by all ten books. I can't really see what people are bitching about. Wheel of Time has never once bored me like, say, the Two Towers did.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/
The fact that you're not sure whether the kids went bowling that day or not is part of the point: that this has just as much to do with them killing their classmates as goth music.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Ilium is far from being as good as Hyperion, but it is extremely ambitious and interesting. The multiple plot threads are handled extremely well. A great read and hopefully Olympos will finish it up as well as Ilium started it.
I was wondering how far down I'd have to scroll to see something on this book.
The best book, by far, that I read this year (and I read many good books) was "The Student Conductor", by Robert Ford. Here's a review I posted at Amazon: "If this novel did not have a masterfully intricate plot, intriguingly human characters, and the liquid, powerful feel of absorbing a symphony in bed, I would read it for the language. The language is such that occasionally I was stopped in the middle of an established rhythm to find myself rereading a sentence, struck by how perfectly it expressed itself. My only warning to a potential reader would be to wait until you're willing to spend some time with it. With work piling up on both sides, I sat down for a break with this book and read it in its entirety within the span of an afternoon, evening, and night. Having finished, I wanted to sit down with the author - or any of his characters - over coffee. Well written, Mr. Ford. " It's not a technical book, in the electronic sense, but it's definitely a worthwhile read.
Marcus du Sautoy's The Music of the Primes, and John Derbyshire's Prime Obsession are two books on the history and lore of the Riemann Hypothesis (after the solution of Fermat's Last Theorem, now generally considered the foremost oustanding unsolved mathematical problem). Surprisingly different, each has content which is mathematically substantial but aimed at a general (OK, ambitious) audience with enough biographical and historical background to suggest the point of this conjecture, and give reasons why a solution may be forthcoming.
My favorite non-Terry Pratchett fiction book of the year was Ilium (which is discussed in another thread above). Why? Because I love my scifi served with a heaping infusion of classics + nanotech. It's not the greatest book of all time, but it was the most enjoyable published-in-2003 fiction of the year for me. Now if someone would just light a fire under George R.R. Martin...
What Liberal Media? gets my nod for best nonfiction of the year, and easily so.
The worst, with a bullet, was Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix. I haven't been so bored and enraged with a book since being forcefed Microserfs a ways back.
Quicksilver was horrid and easily gets my vote for most disappointing book of the year. I like the rough cut pages, though.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Use GnuPG ferpetessake!
1) The dark-one's prison must not be patched, it must be made whole again to the degree that it was never breached.
Or the Dark One killed. The only point to having this story is if this is the end of the cycle. The Dark One threatened to "break the Wheel of Time" and to strangle people "with the corpse of the Great Serpent". If the powers of darkness can make a final end, why not the forces of light? And the novels never say that the bore has to be patched as if it were new, it says it must be patched tightly enough so the Dark One cannot escape.
I mean seriously, the thirteen greatest mages (give or take) of the second age are unleashed on the third age with all of their lost knowledge of the "one power" and their access to the "true power" and the best thing they can come up with is sleeping their way into the bed/court of a queen?
Don't forget that most of them, at least, don't have access to any angreal or sa'angreal. And that a circle of thirteen Aes Sedai can take any one of them down. And the fact that they're just as likely to nuke each other if one of them exposes themself. They're going to be cautious.
The problem with the story isn't so much Jordan's dug himself into a hole, but either he doesn't know how to end the story, or he doesn't want to. Or, as some people think, his editors are being bastards.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Damm, I forget to bash microsoft or mention the RIAA just once and I get modded down as a troll. I best reread jihad site
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
We know that the wheel of time is not/will not be broken because the past-tense nature of the narrative. (Consider the opening of each book, and the expression that each cycle shifts the outcome of each cycle just nudges the next cycle a little more to one side or the other. [all of this is established cannon.]) The dark one needs to break the wheel of time to escape back to the realm of the creator (or some such), and tries every round. To some extent the entrity of the purpose of the wheel is to imprision the dark one.
Doesn't mean he actually can nor ever will. The *creator* couldn't kill the dark one, how could Rand.
===
As for the other, they shoudl be able to *make* or *steal* the angreal and sa'angreal. Nobody alive should be competent to stand against them. Hell, the Black Aja could, and rightfully should given their access in the tower and their apparent numbers, plunder the place dry overnight. Since the one power and the true power are (essentially) invisible to one another there is NO EXCUSE for the forsaken to not have all the tools and power they want.
That is why I feel these characters are so Sindely Wiplash. They don't just quash their enemies, they dont wield compulsion (except the one who makes sex-toys out of people) they don't really leverage traveling or gate-making even though they all clearly know how to do it.
They just tie the damsel to the raliroad tracks and then ride away before the train is even in the neighborhood.
It makes for intracately wroght but still incompetent villans. And badly executed villans just cannot maintian their apeal.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
You've got it right on!
Meh.
The Fasion Geek may appear expensively-dressed, decidedly bohemian, or outright eccentric. They express themselves through clothing, and a procifiency in this ability often fools larger society into thinking that they are not geeks -- even to the point where a Fashion Geek joins the BeautiPeople as a trendy designer. Demographically, Fashion Geeks are female, homosexual, or meterosexual (ugly term, regrettably apt). In this sense they are the yin to the yang of the Tech Geek.
Fashion geeks are usually found in large clusters for socioeconomic reasons. As their profession is a specialized one, only large, sophisticated, wealthy, or artsy cities can support their existence.
All in all a fascinating subspecies. It is a pleasure to work with them.
===============
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
You started off well, but wouldn't the eagle (try to) eat the rat?
If we were ants living on a Rubik's cube, differential geometry would be a little more confusing.
For a great overlap of flashy action movies and books, read Matthew Reilly's books. The latest one is "Scarecrow" and certainly matched his previous books in pace and action. I couldn't put it down until I finished it!
Matthew, in my opinion, is the best novel writer in Australia.
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
Tough call, but my four nominees are "Basement Magic" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May) "The Hanging Curve" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, April), and "The Seasons of the Ansarac" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, February), and "The Navatar" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct/Nov) Seeing a trend? I do have other subscriptions, honest. >.>
Other runners-up are definetly "Mortal Engines" (Asimov's Science Fiction, December), and September's issue of Asimov's Science Fiction offers me a bounty of excellent stories: "Off on a Starship", "The Long Way Home", "Focus Group", "Big Ugly Mama And The Zk".
Hell, I'm on a roll: Fantasy & Science Fiction's October/November issue featured "Like Minds", "Almost Home", and another especially treasured favorite, "The Navatar".
My choice for best Novella of the year: "The Fluted Girl" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, June).
I'm utterly unaffiliated with the magazine, just a particularly happy subscriber (to Asimov's, Analog, and Fantasy & Science Fiction), and I truly cannot understate how good the quality of these publications are to any literary fan, in particular Fantasy & Science Fiction.
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
It's actually a 2002 book, but I believe it's first US printing is 2003, so here goes: "It Must Be Beautiful, Great Equations of Modern Science". Edited by Graham Farmelo, this book is a collection of essays by 11 of todays best and brightest. The readings aren't dry at all, and science/mathematics buffs will be struck by how palatable this book is. For me, it drove home one thing I always knew to be factual, but never considered in philisophical terms, that formulae aren't just tools for calculations, they're expressions of ideas. That point is well made in chapter one when Einstein is compared to Planck, especially in that they both came up with the same E=hf formula, but applied to nearly unrelated areas of physics (cavity radiation vs quantum radiation). Then the point is further illustrated in talking about the Drake equation, a formula well blasted for its uselessness, but highly lauded for it's ability to provoke deep scientific discussion on topics from astrophysics to cosmology to sociology and philosophy.
I'm about half way through this book right now, and I find myself going back to dwell on previous chapters I've already read. While I don't exactly have a hard-on for this book, it is interesting enough that I'd recommend it to anyone with a menial mathematics and physics background who is interested in a new insight into the mundane triviality of text-book errata.
It lacked polish and pacing. The plot had problems with maintaining tension or building to a climax. It was a lot of really neat scenes cobbled together. The ending was anti-climatic... when I got to the last page I wondered where the last chapter was. Not sure if the book needed to be twice as long (to flesh it out more), or if some parts shouldn't have been chopped to allow other sections to be fleshed out properly.
No-one edits these days, I think. If writers don't have the natural skills to do it themselves (and Neal, for all his skills as a writer, hasn't shown much form in the editing of his own work) it doesn't seem to happen very much.
Most of Neal's books (except maybe Zodiac, the book before Snow Crash) struggle with their pacing and seem to have their endings written in a hurry. His writing is very good though, on a paragraph-to-paragraph level -- plenty of detail while still being readable and amusing.
deus does not exist but if he does
I myself am an avid fantasy reader, and i have to say Terry Brooks is at the top of my favorite writers. He continues to put out book after book based on Shannara. The latest, "Jarka Ruus, (High Druid of Shannara, Book 1)" is just as suberb as Brook's previous works. If you're into fantasy adventure, I highly recommend all the shannara series'. But, thats just me. :P
I think the series went downhill from the first book. Its just too much description without any advace in the plot...
The song of ice and fire is great!!! highly reccommended..go right ahead.
C++ programming. The ending is absolutely fabulous, it completely catches you by surprise. I don't want to spoil it.
The sequel visual C++ programming features some nasty villains too. Oh the 3rd chapter's the best. I must have read it 20 times.
Frito yelped as the great bird swooped low and snatched them both from death with its rubberized talons.
"Name's Gwahno," said the Eagle as they climbed sharply awy from the disintegrating land. "Find a seat."
"But how -" began Frito.
"Not now, mac," the bird snapped. "Gotta figure a flight plan outta this dump."
- _Bored of the Rings_
Gee, I thought it was really good. I haven't read all of the other books, but I could see the difference.
It's not that the quality has gone down, it's just a different type of book. The main characters are (almost) all big shots now, so there's a different focus.
I can see how someone might like the early books but not the more recent ones -- or the other way around -- but I kind of like both.
-- . . ramblin' . . .
I think 1633 by Eric flint and David Weber deserves to be at the top of this list.
I bought "Nanotechnology, the next big thing" (or some such) on the strength of the /. review. This was a mistake.
Best book: The Quantum Universe - interesting on a technical level and gives me a superiority complex when I spot the chemistry mistakes.
I know the truth and I know what you're thinking
I would say there is a large portion of sport geeks here in the UK. Although their main focus is Football. Just Look at the sales of a particular computer game Championship Manager here.
- The Marx Family Saga (Juan Goytisolo)
- The Viceroy of Ouidah (Bruce Chatwin)
- Ka (Roberto Calasso)
- China: Empire of the Written Symbol (Cecilia Lindqvist)
- The Visual Display of Quantiative Information (Edward Tufte)
- The Earthsea Trilogy (Ursula Le Guin)
Of course none of those were published this year, but my reading is rarely "cutting-edge".Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
i dont know if it was published in 03 or not but the redemption of althalus by david and leigh eddings was damn good.
kaens.blogspot.com
I think it was actually written to sell marchandise.
by Eric Flint looking foeward to "Ring of Fire"
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
An article pointing out the various factual errors in "The Da Vinci Code can be found here.
Amazon has a best of 2003 booklist.
All as may be, but I still have often problems selecting my next book to read. Even books appraised by awards of site aren't always up my alley. Because I'm a bit of a slow reader, I want to make sure that the book I select is good.
Therefor I'd like to see a site for books like what allmusic.com does for music. (Allbooks.com brings you to Amazon.) Amazon is not exactly the same. It's ways to search for books are too limited.
Also I would like to choose my next book to read a bit like I select a recipe to cook on some recipe sites: I want a recipe with ingredient A and B, what recipes do you got with those.
Does any of this exist? (Maybe I should start such a site?)
I found the Captain Crunch cereal eating elaboration pretty amusing myself; maybe the humor is lost if you haven't had it or whatever...
But I'll agree with you that Ayn Rand sucks.
I've read every word the Master wrote. But they should have left this one "lost". Not a novel; simply a lecture in economic theory. (With footnotes and an appendix!) But technically, I guess it's the worst book of 1939, so maybe I'm off topic. :)
I absolutely agree. I read Cryptonomicon on a friend's recommendation and found it interesting, and thought I'd give Quicksilver a go too. Since starting, I've put it down a number of times, and have actually read about 4 or 5 books whilst taking a break from it. There are some interesting bits in it, but for the most part I find it too dry.
I never have seen his endings as rushed. I've seen them as incomplete as are his beginnings. It all comes down to the fact that they seem to be written as if you'd jumped into the life of the characters and when the current crisis is over, you jump out.
They never start before the beginning, only when the action relevant to the story begins and never go beyond what the plot which the book focuses. There is never a bunch of background of the characters that cannot be gained through the process of telling the story and there is never a "happily ever after" at the end.
Think of them as documentaries. They start filming then they stop. The characters lived before and after, but unless the before was covered in the body of the film, we don't know much about their past and the future isn't covered at all.
This year's The Scar should have won the Hugo. Unfortunately, my fellow Torontonians decided to give it to the latest craptacularity from our resident wannabe Robert Sawyer. Bah.
The Scar is an awesome standalone novel/travelogue that's brutally honest and spectacularly imaginitive in its fantasy. No elves here indeed.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
THANKS! Heard him interviewed on the radio, but didn't have the title or author's name. It sounded fascinating, but not enough to walk into the book store to ask ab't "a book about some guy w' something like autism".
Psst, buddy, do you want to know how Robert Jordan will end Wheel of Time?
Spoiler space.
Hey, don't spoil it for yourself.
Wade through another 20 volumes.
The Lone Gunpeople are dead.
Rosebud is a kind of flower.
At the end of "Worst Episode Ever", Homer Simpson is accosted by a race of subterranean elven horse jockeys.
At the end of LotR, Sauron is defeated.
There are Ewoks in Return of the Jedi.
USS Voyager returns to Earth in the final two-parter.
Spoiler space.
Wheel of Time, all n volumes of it, has been a dream of one of the minor characters. The end.;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I borrowed a copy of Dude, Where's My Country from a friend for reading. Meh. It's basically what Scott Adams would sound like if he wrote about politics, except that Michael Moore has a higher reliance on facts.
Interesting reading, but definitely rather lowbrow. Bah.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I only ever read SnowCrash, and, althouth I liked it very well, haven't been able to get interested in any of the other story lines by reading the blurb on the back of the books. My friends recommend them, but when they describe them, they don't interest me.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I think this Penny Arcade cartoon sums up my feelings about Brian Herbert's enterprise very succinctly.;)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
"Treason", by Ann Coulter. That guy has issues. And breasts.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
yes, you can see the true nature of slashdot. /. users use a windows system of some sort--I personally use windows 98--at least for compatability issues, but any of them would willingly and readily make fun of the bugs of windows. In both cases it's partially pointing out the obvious and inherent flaws, but partially being rebellious and hypocritical.
as geeks, the original social outcasts, there is a prominent tendency to rebel against the societal, political, and religious "right". As Christianity is the religious 'right,' it will be made fun of, whereas Judaeism, as a 'more liberal' religion, is respected. This functions in basically the same way that windows-dissing fucntions--I'd be willing to bet that half of the
btw, if one notices how the ring managed to get found by gollum, one can probably assume that the string would break and the rat would fall, or the eagle would eat the rat or something--the hobbits had to carry the ring because they had willpower, and in small number so that they weren't seen.
Absolute agreement on Adamson. Not weighty stuff, perhaps, but damn fine reads. And his third, Pachinco Dreaming, is the best so far -- and is indeed a bit weightier than the others.
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
...is much easier for me to understand than "Quicksilver" as best.
First of all, let me say that any impartial observer would predict that I would like Stephenson's latest book a lot: I am a big Neal Stephenson fan. I loved "Cryptonomicon" (which shares the "Quicksilver" tendency toward digression -- heck it even shares a character). My degree is in the philosophy of science, and that's really what "Quicksilver" is about. (I even have had a long-time interest in the conflict between Leibniz and Newton, which is the lens through which Stephenson looks at the philosophy of science in this book.) I have an interest in military history and have been reading a lot lately about The 30 Years War (which figures at least tangentially in the book).
Despite all these reasons I would be expected to enjoy "Quicksilver," I didn't like it much. You will probably like it less. I found myself gaining some insights from it (particularly on the English-Civil-War side of things), but I read it more like I might read a dull textbook on something I needed to know than as a gripping tale.
Looking at what's wrong with the book:
First of all, it's really not one really long book. It's really three fairly long books: "Quicksilver," "The Prince of Vagabonds" (or maybe it's "The King of Vagabonds") and "Odalesque." I have no idea why the publisher chose to present it as one book instead of as a trilogy (except perhaps that only the middle book would have any chance of being accepted by readers). If you're having trouble wading through the first part, skip to the second book ("The Prince of Vagabonds" really can stand on its own.)
Looking at the "Quicksilver" part: Stephenson seems to have realized his account of Newton and the Royal Society is not a rousing enough tale to make a novel. So he has intercut that account with an action-filled story about a crafty Dutch captain outfoxing Blackbeard in a sea battle. The pirate battle has almost nothing to do with the rest of the story (in fact, it takes place long after the events in the "Odalesque" part of the trilogy). If this book had been published separately, I would suggest readers interested in Newton read that part and everybody else read the Blackbeard part (if I suggested reading it all).
Looking at the "Prince of Vagabonds" part: As I suggested earlier, this was my favorite part. The only problem is that it has almost nothing to do with the main subject of the book (the Newton-Leibniz conflict). Some people may have difficulty believing in the "glorious stupidity" of the main character, but I know a guy who is just like Half-Cocked Jack so it was no problem for me.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Best book I've read in a while that isn't from
O'Reilly. Basically the book is about some of the
really dumb ideas that have found their way into
pro wrestling. Guess if you like pro wrestling you'll
like the book. If you don't watch it, you probably will
have no idea what the book is talking about most of the time.
The www site the
book is taken from
I realize this is slightly off-topic, but stay with me.
/.'ed, by Steven Erikson (book 1: Gardens of the Moon). Its intelligent, well-writen, compelling. He builds a world with great characters and I cannot get enough of it. There are four books out now and a fifth due in late spring. I read somewhere that his series has not been picked up by any US publisher. Well its everywhere in Canada, and shipping is cheap.
I agree, WOT has fallen considerably in my mind as of late; especially book 10. I've been getting the feeling with the later WOT books that the story is moving sideways, instead of forwards. He's introducing so many new things that the story has come to a standstill. Book 10 can be explained in about a paragraph, really only two things happened. Its getting to the point that I'm not going to rush out and buy book 11 in fancy hardcover when it comes out.
Admittedly though, I feel the same about the Sword of Truth series, but in its case, I haven't lost interest in the story. Its a bit cheesy, but full of violence, torture, sex, magic, epic wars and struggles; in short, a good-ole fashioned fantasty romp. I felt Pillars of Creation was a bit of a unwanted diversion, but Naked Empire has restored my faith in a series I almost feel guilty for loving.
However, that's not why I write. I simply have to bring this next series to everyone's attention. The Malazan Book of the Fallen series and another link when the first one is
Song of Ice and Fire is incredible (Btw, check out the free except to book 4)and I give Geore R.R. Martin all my respect, but in my world, Song of Ice and Fire and the Malazan series stand together on the podium.
If you love fantasy, get Gardens of the Moon; its that simple.
Pest
Wil Wheaton's foray into the published world has been quite a success, with O'Reilleys picking it up for mass distribution shortly next month.
:)
I really want a copy of this. Who else would?
my God but you are an arrogant, self-righteous, hypocritical little prick. The guy's original comment was perfectly valid and you presume to take it and figure out his life view? Logical inconsistency?? That's the funniest shit I've heard in a while. I have a feeling rational argument with you isn't even possible, and I'd end up just kicking your dumb ass. Oh and your .sig is lame too. cheers,
~mantis
1. William Gibson's Pattern recognition. Hey folks, don't forget who invented the word "Cyberspace". No kiddies it was'nt Al Gore.
2. Stephen King's "the Wolves of the Calla". Long but if you like King, the story goes on in scary style.
3. Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix.
I thought i would put my 3 cents in. I read at least 1 book a week even while working so those are the ones that came to mind first.
Sincerely, Czephyr
That's because "New Spring" was already written as a short story, and it was well recieved by the fans. If he can recapture some of the magic of his first WoT books, people that haven't bought the last 2 or 3 books might by the next book in the series.
Writing is a much more mature art than video, or even recorded music. If you were alive when the technology was transitioning from clay tablets to scrolls to hand-written to print, you would have noticed the change. There have not been very many consumer-noticable changes in books since the printing press became popular. (Well, the art of binding keeps improving, and paperbacks are rather new.)
Video (also called motion pictures or movies) is much younger. Recently, StarWars revolutionized special effects, and Matrix and LOTR are still pushing forward. Until technological progress slows down, consumers will be able to date movies by their production quality.
Same with music: You can usually tell the decade that music was recorded by the quality of production. Every decade brings great improvements in compression and noise reduction. The only time this was not obvious was the 1990s, because popular music did not require any clarity, and the popular format was the CompactDisc, which uses a digital format at a resolution well inside the most people's perception. Clarity may return once bandwidth is better and the popular format (MP3s?) are recorded at decent resolutions.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
is an excellent book. Couldn't put it down.
This year was kind of hectic, so most of my reading was confined to EVO magazine and text-books. I did get a chance to read some books though. The Rum Diaries, by Hunter S. Thompson was definitely an enjoyable read, some nice escapism, with enjoyable, slightly-debauched characters. Middle East Illusions, by Noam Chomsky was also quite interesting. Obviously people probably know where they stand on this one, but his critique of US foreign policy towards Israel and his suggestions at the motivations behind it are quite interesting, whether you agree or not.
I never have seen his endings as rushed. I've seen them as incomplete as are his beginnings.
:)
Well... often his prose is nowhere near as descriptive; i.e. a lot more happens (in terms of plot advancement) within 50 pages towards the end of a book compared to 50 pages near the start. You could argue for differences in tone here, but it does read like he's getting a little sick of the work and isn't giving it the same level of development he did when he was more enthusiastic about the project. (Zodiac being an exception here, as I think it was more strongly plotted and balanced in prose than anything else I've read of his; Diamond Age and Snow Crash are particularly bad examples of the problem under discussion. Haven't yet finished Quicksilver, so I can't speak on that yet.)
If he's going to use the narrative form, it's probably a good idea to stick to its structure (i.e. beginning, middle and end), given that he's not really breaking any of the other narrative conventions (strongly identifiable narrator(s), etc.) The ends of his books aren't deliberately incomplete, they're partially plotted and incompletely fleshed out; whether that's because he's rushed or interrupted during writing, or just too slack to finish in time (a la Douglas Adams), is something I can't really know without talking to all concerned.
BTW: My phrasing looks a little odd to me, but it's 3am here and I can't really work out why. Submitting as is.
deus does not exist but if he does
Nightwatch was very satisfying for me. I've read some negative reviews on the web, etc, and maybe expected less-than-good, but instead was very happy with the book.
This book requires having read SOME of the previous watch books, to get the feel for the characters and world. In a way, this is a kind of parody of the already-parody diskworld, the characters and events turning into themselves. The richness and depth is great, as I said, satisfying like a fine meal.
Terry creates a great character with Vimes, and he is maturing and getting better with each new book, IMHO.
BTW, anyone share my enjoyment of re-reading Pratchett books? I find that revisiting the books from time to time is very rewarding. Not all authors can be re-read successfully. (of course LOTR is great for re-reading, too).
I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I don't see it, so its worth a mention. Absolute OpenBSD is an excellent read for beginers and intermediates to the system, and a handy reference to everyone. Not a super great read, but certainely worth looking at.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
yes!
:)
I read this book on a trip to auckland recently, found it most excellente.
Nice choice