THE BORE
General => The Superdeep Borehole => Topic started by: Van Cruncheon on November 18, 2007, 10:11:32 PM
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i just finished reading shadow of the torturer and i must recant: the book of the new sun is an awesome, awesome series. i was a stupid teenager -- i'd read the first two books at age 14-15 and loathed it, preferring donaldson's chronicles of thomas covenant for my arty high fantasy-cum-allegory shizzat. i was wrong.
shadow of the torturer :bow :bow :bow
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WHAT ARE THESE BOOKS YOU SPEAK OF, SIR?
Looks like I'm about to order some shit off of Amazon.
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Tangent! What's your cutoff age for trusting your own past opinions?
I'm going with a rolling "five years younger than present" just to be safe.
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Tangent! What's your cutoff age for trusting your own past opinions?
I'm going with a rolling "five years younger than present" just to be safe.
Generally, most things I thought/believed in before 22 have proven to be mostly worthless... so, not to date myself (altho no one else is, haha) I guess I go back about 8 years or so.
I mean, teenage me liked Dragonlance. Dragonlance. So yeah.
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oh god you never even got to the last two books?? you're in for a treat.
let me know if you want more Wolfe recs once you finish it! I'm like 1/3 through Pirate Freedom so far; it's fun though admittedly pretty thematically slight (so far).
I agree with the sliding present for past trustworthiness. I think I go back about 7-8 years.
Raoul: You want Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun," a four book series generally published nowadays as two books: Shadow and Claw, and Sword and Citadel.
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The premise seems realy interesting. I would read them if I had more time. Nowadays, I just go to Wikipedia to get a quick summary of interesting books.
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Aside: I normally roll my eyes at "named" weapons in fantasy novels, but Terminus Est is the best name for a sword ever.
Also, when I was 14 or 15 I thought that Asimov was, like, the best author EVER. Now I can't bear to read his stuff, it's so wooden.
Addendum: Book of the New Sun is the only fantasy series that I can take seriously as competition for Tolkien in terms of language and world building.
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Been years since I read Asimov, but I remember his stuff being right up my alley in terms of readability. Characters talking in front of a cardboard background, bouncing ideas off of each other, like a sci-fi Jane Austen.
Tolkien's at the other end of the spectrum. I've made half a dozen serious attempts to read the LOTR books, and get smacked around by the prose every time. He starts to paint a word-picture of a dell or grove or something, and I'm done.
For whatever reason, I run into a brick wall when I read physical descriptions of the scenery. Any genre, any reading level. I start to zone out and skim the words without really processing them. I bet there's a quirky psychological disorder I could self-diagnose based on this.
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Tangent! What's your cutoff age for trusting your own past opinions?
I'm going with a rolling "five years younger than present" just to be safe.
Same for me, except it's more like five days.
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Been years since I read Asimov, but I remember his stuff being right up my alley in terms of readability. Characters talking in front of a cardboard background, bouncing ideas off of each other, like a sci-fi Jane Austen.
Tolkien's at the other end of the spectrum. I've made half a dozen serious attempts to read the LOTR books, and get smacked around by the prose every time. He starts to paint a word-picture of a dell or grove or something, and I'm done.
For whatever reason, I run into a brick wall when I read physical descriptions of the scenery. Any genre, any reading level. I start to zone out and skim the words without really processing them. I bet there's a quirky psychological disorder I could self-diagnose based on this.
No disorder, you just don't have any extroverted sense. I bet you don't like doing rote work with tools either.