metal dawn on 28/10/2009 at 00:21
Quote Posted by dethtoll
reading
Stephanie MeyerI'd rather gargle with sulfuric acid and pull my eyeballs out with tweezers.
june gloom on 28/10/2009 at 00:34
And Dan Brown is worse.
D'Juhn Keep on 28/10/2009 at 01:09
From (
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6194031/The-Lost-Symbol-and-The-Da-Vinci-Code-author-Dan-Browns-20-worst-sentences.html) Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences
Quote:
The Da Vinci Code, opening sentence: Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery.
Angels and Demons, opening sentence: Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.
Deception Point, opening sentences: Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.
Professor Pullum: “Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence”.
the_grip on 28/10/2009 at 01:12
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
I started to read my first fiction book to read in a while, since maybe The Road, which had been gathering dust on my bookshelf.
Scots, is The Road any good? I ordered Blood Meridian... never read it before.
Should be in later this week with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. According to my coworker the latter book rocks, but it seems like it might be pop fiction. We'll see. Until then I'm inducing self-inflicted torture by trying to get through A Feast for Crows.
theBlackman on 28/10/2009 at 01:28
Quote Posted by dj_ivocha
I don't want a MMO browser Honorverse game, I want movies and TV series instead. :(
(honorverse.com mailing list kru represent as of now. Any idea on when it'll be done?)
[...]
I could live with that. Harrington kicks ass.
Scots Taffer on 28/10/2009 at 01:36
Good one, Iggles.
grip: I want to read Blood Meridian as I've heard it's bloody good, although supposedly devastatingly scary in terms of its antagonist. That said, I'm a little scared because if The Road is anything to go by - his style is BLEAK BLEAK BLEAK, unrelentingly so.
It can be a bit of a drudgery. Ultimately I think there's a touching study of a father son dynamic under the most intense pressure at work in The Road and how the seed of humanity can survive in even the harshest of environments, but by the end of it all you just feel drained and so much of the book is painfully ugly that I struggle to recommend it.
june gloom on 28/10/2009 at 02:16
Quote Posted by the_grip
Scots, is The Road any good? I ordered Blood Meridian... never read it before.
I dunno about Scots but IMO The Road is excellent, the writing style is unconventional but it gives a sense of the frayed and haggard life the two characters lead.
frozenman on 28/10/2009 at 03:29
LOL. I'm reminded of Garth Marenghi...jesus...I
figured his books were bad but I didn't think people actually wrote like that.
It seems that in the past few years there have been a number of these hyper-pop-fuction books, Harry Potter, Twilight, Dan-Brown-fuckery. (Were there books that reached this level of popularity before and I just didn't notice? Or is it safe to say that they're on a different tier of mass-market appeal, this is a recent phenomenon?) Now, I've avoided them like a plague, I've avoided them on
principle, and every now and then I feel a pang of elitism- What you think you're too GOOD for them just cause everyone else likes them doesn't MEAN they're bad! But I've tried to reason thus: Books generally don't get that popular, so if they DO become that popular there must be
something about them that makes them so popular, and this thing is generally an enormously hackneyed writing style.
Has anyone read
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace? One of the main characters in it judges stories for a literary magazine, and he submits a story himself, and it includes the line "He smiled wryly" "'He smiled wryly' nobody smiles wryly unless its described that way in a book." I guess its the difference between showing and telling, I forgot where I was going...
Aja on 28/10/2009 at 04:09
I've noticed characters in science fiction "grin" often. I think it indicates to the reader who the rogues are.
fett on 28/10/2009 at 05:37
Quote Posted by frozenman
Now, I've avoided them like a plague, I've avoided them on
principle, and every now and then I feel a pang of elitism- What you think you're too GOOD for them just cause everyone else likes them doesn't MEAN they're bad!
But yeah, it usually does. I was like that about Harry Potter for the longest time, but I eventually gave in and was really glad I did. You have to come to the point where you can just enjoy something because you do, even if a billion other people like it. I readily acknowledge the Rowling is a terrible writer, using worn out fantasy conventions, but there was something about those books that made me comfortable and provided a really enjoyable read. That's all I really care about because nobody's pouring over my book collection telling me what's cool or not. Hell, I'm reading Janet Evanovich stuff right now, totally out of my preferred genre, but I'm enjoying the hell out of them - and they're not at all good from a literary standpoint, completely disposable, pop rubbish. But I look forward to settling in with her characters every night before going to sleep, and that's really what I care about.
