A+

^

As someone who obv watched the show but never read the books and had never read anything fantasy before do you think I can pick these up and fully understand "the world" and enjoy it?

think of them as more political thrillers with a side of fantasy

what i love about the novels is the battle itself will get the yadda yadda treatment but the coalition building and figuring out how they'll feed the army and make sure those lords who each have a couple hundred men each to contribute are happy enough to be loyal

only read some of the dunk and egg stuff to my knowledge and believe it was the first - it very much works as a standalone work, they actually predate the GoT events as well

show is pretty faithful in the first few seasons and then just went out of control nuts so reading the books themselves would be a pretty fresh story once you hit the 3rd or 4th one

Wanted something easy and quick to read so start the Jo Nesbø Harry Hole series from the beginning. I was told the first two books are pretty bad and to start with book 3 but I'm a completionist so wanted to start from the beginning.

The first book was pretty bad. The plot was something you would expect out of a high school kid for an imaginative writing class. Really bad and the ending was cringeworthy. BUT it was a fast easy read and i was fairly warned so I'm going to press on at least through his 3rd book before I give up completely.

Anyone read any of the below?

Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles
All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

I’m currently on Furlough from work / lockdown, so working through my Goodreads lists. The above three books are on my Amazon wish list, and are most likely my next purchases. Does anyone have any feedback on them?

2 are excellent. 1 really good. I would read in this order:

All the light we cannot see - when I read this I said it was the best book I had read in years
A gentleman in Moscow - you need to be patient for about 150 pages, but stick with it. Outstanding, and up there with towles’ first book, rules of civility. Has themes that should resonate in quarantine times.
Where the crawdads sing - also really good, similar in themes to educated, will make a great Reese Witherspoon vehicle

+1 on All the Light We Cannot See

Thanks for the feedback. I've just added Rules of Civility to my Goodreads "want to read" list, so thanks for that suggestion too.

A footnote from Gibbon*.

*To purchase his mistress, a Mingrelian gentleman sold twelve priests and his wife to the Turks.


It is always enjoyable when individuals display such judicious wisdom and panache. And Gibbon was wise to include this small tidbit of history to his Masterpiece.



You may now continue the regularly scheduled programming............

Reading Ted Chiang's latest collection. Superb.

I've started this, and it's excellent. I haven't been able to figure out how he can trigger emotional responses from me with such minimalist storytelling. At least, I consider it minimalist. I'll have to wait until I read more to have a better opinion.

In an attempt to up my reading street cred, I'm reading more poetry.



art spiegelman did the illustrations and his introduction is a literary masterpiece.

"Of course it's poetry. It rhymes." -William Burroughs

So I pick up a Cormac McCarthy book and am immediately gobsmacked with this:

I had forgotten how beautiful his sentences were. When you're that good, you can get away with anything. I've tried to write like that but it always comes across as precious when I do it.

FYP

A+

I admit I'm a very amateur reader but I dont get the genius of stuff like this. Just seems like an unnecessary run on sentence to me

Cosigned.

Read in a vacuum, that sentence is doing nothing for me.

I call it genius because it works, in the sense that I can follow what's happening, and also in the sense that it controls the pace of the story and keeps it flowing with a steady rhythm. He also does his conversations without quotation marks, which was a problem for me until I got into the spirit of things.

It’s the little details of LIVING, the unconscious actions of everyday, that places the reader THERE. And it flows like the day itself...

Many people agree with you, see A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers.

From the Wiki entry:
Muscular Prose: Cormac McCarthy
Myers criticizes McCarthy for filling his sentences with bulky words that contain no real detail or meaning. He uses the following as an example from The Crossing: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her." Myers follows: "This is a good example of what I call the andelope: a breathless string of simple declarative statements linked by the conjunction "and". Like the "evocative" slide-show and the Consumerland shopping-list, the andelope encourages skim-reading while keeping up the appearance of 'literary' length and complexity. But like the slide-show (and unlike the shopping-list), the andelope often clashes with the subject matter, and the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the methodical meal that is being described."

McCarthy's prose, Myers quips, "is unspeakable in every sense of the word," implying that it is both awful and frequently difficult to imagine a person saying. McCarthy's use of archaisms is also brought under scrutiny.

Do any of you have kids? This is exactly how kids tell stories, which make it seem natural to me, but the fact that someone would call it muscular or literary indicates that, once again, I'm missing the point.

picked up shoe dog and when america first met china (despite the lame title it's actually really interesting about how americans dove head first into international trading once they shed themselves of british monopolies and where my "location" is sourced from)

haven't started shoe dog yet but i've heard great things about it

Shoe dog is great

I wouldn't call Meyers "many people." For years now he's been going out of his way to say things that are deliberately provocative in his desire to prove that the literary "elites" are naïve, and he's the only one who sees through their pretensions. He has a pompous tone and a condescending attitude. He wants to be the American James Wood but he isn't remotely in the same league.

http://https://themillions.com/2010/...-r-meyers.html