(gene wolfe-bore) patel is right and i am a stupid

[Van Cruncheon]

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

[Human Snorenado]

WHAT ARE THESE BOOKS YOU SPEAK OF, SIR?

Looks like I'm about to order some shit off of Amazon.

[Mandark]

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.

[Human Snorenado]

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.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

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.

[Smooth Groove]

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. 

[Howard Alan Treesong]

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.

[Mandark]

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.

[recursivelyenumerable]

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.

[Barry Egan]

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.