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I'll have to check out those Malazan books then - I've read and loved everything else you mentioned.

theavondon wrote:

behndy wrote:just read Ready Player One finally. LOVED IT.

starting Lamb by Christopher Moore. s'posed to be way funny. which is good. i watch too many angry and violent and depressing movies.

good to have balance.

Lamb is fucking hilarious. Moore is one of my dad's favorite authors.

nice. yeah, heard good things. been stoopid busy so only read the first few pages.

huh. wonder if eventually ereader interfaces will become so ubiquitous that the concept of a "page" is nonsensical and shrouded in mystery. same way if you say "roll up the window" to anybody 20 or under it doesn't really make sense.

goroth wrote:I'll have to check out those Malazan books then - I've read and loved everything else you mentioned.

They seem to get a lot of praise every place.
The world building in these books far outweighs that of any of the previously mentioned fantasy books. This shit is just... DENSE. I love it, though.

odontophobia wrote:

futuresailors wrote:

odontophobia wrote:Having a degree in creative writing should probably force me to lean to the snobby side but, fuck it, guys, I just love fantasy. There's plenty of fine writing in genre-fiction.

I'd have thought it would force you to lean towards bullshit like Howl.

Howl is fine. Ginsberg is okay but I don't really read him. But I really disliked Kerouac. I found On the Road to be some of the most boring drivel I've read.

I like Bukowski just fine.

I'm more into the magically real and post-modern. Which probably explains my love of the fantasy genre. I couldn't care less about sci-fi. But fantasy? You want that guy to cast spells? Count me in.

On the Road is ok--its the cult of personality surrounding Kerouac that kind of turns me off.

New Pynchon book got "announced" on Amazon about a month ago. I'm excited.

I've only read The Crying of Lot 49, and at the time at least it didn't really do anything for me. ???

goroth wrote:I've only read The Crying of Lot 49, and at the time at least it didn't really do anything for me. ???

To me it's his classic and would be the one I'd recommend to anyone not familiar with Pynchon. So maybe you just don't like him.
Whenever I think of that book my mind has some weird misconnection. I can remember reading it in my chemistry class in my Lisbon school, but I only started reading Pynchon when I was already out of school.

Really enjoying this Graphic Novel:

odontophobia wrote:Having a degree in creative writing should probably force me to lean to the snobby side but, fuck it, guys, I just love fantasy.

What?! There is so much good writing in fantasy. You ever read Patricia A. McKillip's The Riddlemaster trilogy? Pick that shit up. And C. J. Cherryh's Fortress series. Good shit. Seriously love Steven Erikson's Malazan series too.

Read The Erasers a while back and kindof enjoyed it, but this, oh fuck... good novel.

jfrey wrote:

odontophobia wrote:Having a degree in creative writing should probably force me to lean to the snobby side but, fuck it, guys, I just love fantasy.

What?! There is so much good writing in fantasy. You ever read Patricia A. McKillip's The Riddlemaster trilogy? Pick that shit up. And C. J. Cherryh's Fortress series. Good shit. Seriously love Steven Erikson's Malazan series too.

Malazan is, having finished only the first two books, fucking amazing. Erikson's writing is superb. I wouldn't discount fantasy as a genre at all -- but, well, it's weird because on one hand you're involved in this program that treats basically everything that is not literary fiction as complete and utter rubbish, to be scoffed at and you're also aware of the bad stuff that's out there. It's sometimes easier than it may seem to write stuff off.

But it boils down to, being a few years removed from academia, I'm just in to reading whatever I feel like. I took a trip to Austin, TX for work and only read the Wheel of Time series. Took a trip to Spain for my honey moon and only read back-issues of the New Yorker and David Foster Wallace.

I'll continue to do and read what I want. And now, thanks for some recommendations.

erector wrote:

Read The Erasers a while back and kindof enjoyed it, but this, oh fuck... good novel.

I have a copy of this on my shelves some place -- I haven't gotten through it yet. I read one of his shorts in undergrad and I remember really liking it.

lol. it's also the SciFi Ghetto thing.

it was hilarious when Terry Goodkind started screaming about his books were objectionisnt fiction, not fantasy, DON'T YOU DARE SHELVE THEM IN FANTASY.

he's horrible though. i remember liking the first three books in the Sword Of Truth series, because he was stealing everything from Robert Jordan (i didna dig Wheel Of Time that much. need to try it again some day.) and making it more violent and interesting. and then it all turnex to horrible, horrible shit from book 4 on. but just reread the first two and he's not.... that good.

i love Richard K. Morgan. dug everything he's done a lot. and his fantasy thinger is interrrrresssting.

I read Kafka On the Shore a few months back, and thought that was dense and weird, but this shit man...

somebody did a webcomic about it awhile ago.... but how the FUCK are Kindle prices more than the physical, had to pay for PRINTING, real world versions of books?

i really hope something's done to bring the prices down a lot. they HAVE to be saving at least $5 a book that they don't have to print and just spew out the code right? more?

annoying.

:up: The man can do no wrong.

Finally started The Difference Engine. Had been putting it off because I find collaborative writing weird, but it's not half bad. It's sorta like "well, this is what it would be like if Gibson were a modernist."

And ebook pricing infuriates me. Almost as much as the whole ebook "rental."

NYPL is not keeping up with the times.
And my school library is even worse. 4 floors of useless business crap. 1 of fiction.
Fortunately, most people are decent enough to upload ebooks to teh interwebz.