Chatterbox: Literature Edition

I've been going through Definitely Dead, which claims to be source for True Blood, so I was expecting some kind of quality, and yet...

I cannot understand how a story about a telepath navigating the intrigues of a world of vampires and werewolves could end up so boring. It might as well have been written for a Dullest Execution Of A Promising Premise award. In the first seven chapters or so there is one case of her using that power with any impact, a few hints at the odd dynamics of shapeshifting beings, and page after page of household chores, making work arrangements and gossip about people I don't care about. There are authors who can make that interesting but not Charlaine Harris. There are no stakes, people come to the protagonist to make demands and get annoyed when she won't comply, but I never get the feeling that there is any weight behind it.

The most glaring trait is that every male character of note is described as a smouldering sex god for whatever reason. The protagonist is just surrounded by these hunks, not because she has any romantic interest in them, but just for atmosphere. It reminds me of certain comics that promise adventure and epic plots, but mostly focus on busty women wearing in skimpy outfits.

I'm a bit disappointed

So, how many pages a day do you usually read? Unless it's a short (ie, under 200 pages) book, I usually manage a little over 100 pages a day for most books.

Depends on the book to be honest, also whether it is a weekend or weekday. Nowadays I listed to audiobooks more because the commute to work is pretty short and commute is when I usually read on weekdays.

Yo, Kings of the Wyld was good.

A generic question about reading to kids, at what point do you, if you read to your children, stop? When they start reading themselves? When they say they don't want it anymore?

And does anyone miss spending quality time in the form of reading to or being read by someone?

Land of Oz derivative writers who take influence from several books are something else. There are just so many books. There's Baum's fourteen and then dozens of others. The series contradicts things so much that you can just pick a random book and read.

My way of reading the series is: read the first seven books then skip to the fourteenth book Glinda of Oz. Ozma and Glinda are my favorite characters so I like reading the books where they're heavily involved.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Sep 18th 2019 at 11:37:18 AM

The trend of having snarking A.I and robots in space/scifi novels that keep on sprouting things like "lower life forms" or "meatbags" is really starting to grind my gears. There must always be the complimentary line about changing its personality matrix/core.

I can't figure out how Paul from Breakfast at Tiffany's is gay. I read the short story two years ago and couldn't notice any hints. Holly is explicitly bi but the narrator doesn't seem to be.

Edit:

I've been spoiled by Warrior Cats when it comes to Erin Hunter books. I just only learned that Survivor Dogs ended for good this year and that Bravelands is only gonna be six books long. I wanted a Sunshine and a Sweet Super Edition at least.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Sep 23rd 2019 at 3:10:19 AM

So I thought about reading Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Then I read about how it contains scenes like a baby getting her throat slitted with a saw.

Yeah, no. I don't care if it's the most famous work by a both Pulitzer Prize and Nobel prize winning writer, I ain't touching it.

Wow. I'm getting flashbacks to a certain infamous My Little Pony fan fic just from that description alone.

Anyway, I just finished A Tale of Magic by Chris Colfer, and I liked it well enough. It was cute and fun, though the side characters are all pretty shallow and the story often got way too preachy for my tastes. I'm not familiar with Colfer's other work, The Land of Stories, but you don't need to be in order to enjoy A Tale of Magic.

I wish HarperCollins published compilations of Erin Hunter works more. I don't have any book stores near me so I'm forced to buy online, but there are just so many books that buying one-by-one is a hassle. There's 80+ Warrior Cats books and at least 12 Seeker Bears books.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Oct 20th 2019 at 12:52:48 PM

Recently finished The Second Founding which is a history tome about the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and there was some strange shit going on in the opposition to them. Some was to be expected, calls about states rights and the omnipresent fear that if you let black men vote the next thing you know they'll want to marry white women.

But a lot of the opposition to the 15th stemmed from places you wouldn't expect it. California and Oregon were worried that if blacks could vote then they'd have to allow the Chines to vote and my home state of Massachusetts, to my shame didn't allow the Irish to vote at the time. Of course very few of the Powers That Were considered letting women have the franchise.

Which brings me to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Oy, she was a piece of work. Wanted the vote for women but only white women. Also brought up the fear of blacks (and Chinese, Irish and German) men being treated as if they were equals and ravishing white (by which she meant WASP and only WASP) women.

I just finished the first book in Jim C. Hines The Princess Series, The Stepsister Scheme...and I'm kind of conflicted about it. There's a lot that I like about it: the main trio are an awesome cast of characters that I loved following, the prose was pretty good without trying too hard, and the fantasy setting was very intriguing to me. However, it took me over a week or so to finish this book, and usually I finish books way quicker than this, even The Rise of Kyoshi, which was much longer and bigger. My complaints with this book are so:

• I felt like the chapters were too long. There are only fifteen of them, but the chapters seemed to go on and on forever, slowing the pace down a lot, and it takes forever for anything to get anywhere. I feel like the pace would be better if the chapters had been cut down and made smaller.
• Often times, something would happen and it would seem like the book forgot to show how it happened or just not mention it. For example, a character gets possessed later on in the story, but we get little to no indication that the character was possessed until a few more pages in. Sometimes it seems like a character just appears and the book fails to mention it, like a character just beamed into the room.

Eh, I like what it tried to do, but it's not one of the better Cinderella retellings. I'll still keep it, though. Oh, and for all you Avatar: The Last Airbender fans out there, go read Rise of Kyoshi. It's awesome and super duper good!

Apparently you're not supposed to read The Magician's Nephew as the first Narnia book?

Well, you can, but I wouldn't advise it. It was the last but one to be published, so it's functionally a prequel to the rest of the series and as a result there's stuff in there you're not exactly going to grasp without reading some of the previously published books, and there might even be some spoilers. The trope page for the series has the order of publication down, which is probably the most straightforward reading order.

I wish publishers made it more clear. I noticed my local library had most of the Narnia books. I've never read any (or seen the films) so I picked up the one listed as the first book. I only read a few chapters, though.

Yeah, the The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is the place start, no question. Many contemporary box sets will order them in the publication order rather than chronologically just because that is the best reading order.

This may be worthy of its own thread, but here's a video about how cover design for books have gotten too generic. It focuses on horror, but the same could be said about all genres:

I've never read a horror book (unless Coraline counts). But I've noticed a lot of YA novels have generic covers.

Something else I've noticed is the trend to have a "uniform look" by all books by a certain author, even if they're all stand-alone novels.

Idiosyncratic Cover Art?

I'm more annoyed by back covers that don't tell much, if anything, about the book. I don't want reviews, I want a synopsis.

The synopsis is usually on the inside of the jacket (unless it's a paperback or older book).

Edited by J79 on Feb 23rd 2020 at 2:20:48 AM

That's how it is with a lot of books nowadays. Twenty-to-thirty years ago, though, synopsis' were also on the back.

Man, now is a REALLY good time to catch up with my reading list.

Have covers really become more generic? I have dozens of science-fiction novels from the seventies and eighties where the editors just stuck on a nice piece of spaceship art from a handful of artists whatever the story was about, and even that was an improvement on earlier books where they used some abstract art or a strange photograph. At least today most cover illustrations are connected to the story in some way.