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Seven of the top ten books of all time are by Ayn Rand or L. Ron Hubbard... who knew?
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player piano was his first novel and even he admitted it was far from his best work
any major dude will tell you
it certainly has its place though
I think my favorite is either Breakfast of Champions or Mother Night
but man Mother Night is so fucking depressing
also God Bless You Mr Rosewater, if just for the babies speech, and I love the ending
Also the beginning and the middle
I read slaughterhouse five for the first time last year and it was excellent
haven't read anything else by him though
The target audience is largely primarily English-speaking, so it makes sense.
If we want to talk outside the English language, Snow made me fall in love with Orhan Pamuk. Skilled novelist very rooted in the experience of modern Turkey. A bit wordy, but not unnecessarily so. Snow uses an isolated, snow-bound village as a microcosm of the Turkish political situation around the millenium. Interesting stuff.
I really like the Russians, but I think I like them better for their short stories than their novels. The book thread suggested a couple of more contemporary authors that I tacked on to my list, and I'm interested to see whether the distinctives of the big-name 19-century guys survived, or if the scene is more of an extension of contemporary Europen literature.
but... both of those words mean the same thing
Pretty much everybody feels that way, but it's not often said since Zelazny was kinda busy dying of cancer when he wrote them. I learned the hard way that the fan community considers it sort of poor form to be too harsh on them.
I guess the combination of pain, exhaustion, and drugs left him kind of not himself, and most people blame that.
Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita would be my suggestion if you some more recent Russians.
Good thing I didn't mention it was probably a stream of consciousness writing project.
Go easy with the puns, or you'll really piss him off
That particular bug is for more contemporary examples. Like, roughly post-millenium? I grabbed a couple examples on kindle when it came up in the book thread, so I've got my start.
I've also been meaning to crack into Soviet literature, though, and it sounds like Bulgakov would make an interesting companion to Solzhenitsyn.
With the upcoming move I really shouldn't be buying more hard-copy books, but the used book store got my copy of Hero of a Thousand Faces in so maybe I'll check...
I looked him up on wiki and was interested to see that he influenced Rand and Vonnegut, amoung others (Huxley's brave new world is an obvious one). How relevant am I to this conversation??!
...now to find a link to Hobbits and boy Wizards.
Kindle has a few translations of We. I think I'm going to snag one. Apparently both of the cheap ones are crap translations, though :-(
gaaaaaaaayyyyy
Also, fucking great.
Fingerprints of the Gods. Apparently all of mankind traces their ancestry back to a civilization that died out millions of years ago that had technology even more advanced than today's which they used to build the pyramids and there's a sunken city of the coast of Egypt and I'm not calling it "Atlantis" but...
This guy is such a pompous ass that it would have started something if I would have called him out on it, so I just took the first opportunity to duck out on his little rant
it's basically just a look inside the mind of an alcoholic as he rides on a train; it has the perfect mix of pathos, poetic language and humor
similar in a lot of ways to 1982, janine by alasdair gray, which i also love
ahem allow me to explain to you how exactly the pyramids were built with the available technological level at the time,
one christmas when I was I guess a sophomore in high school my aunt and uncle got me a trilogy of fantasy books to read because i loved reading fantasy books, they probably just asked the borders guy for a popular series and it was the cheapest set
they were The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the story of a man with leprosy who is basically a failure who suddenly finds himself transported to a mystical land and is apparently the hero of prophecy because of his power to not believe in stupid horseshit legends
After arriving he very quickly realizes that his leprosy has been cured, and he is just so excited to have his body in working condition again that he rapes the woman who was leading him through the woods so he can continue following the prophecy he doesn't believe in
That is in the first third of the first book, after getting him to the next town she never comes up again as far as I remember and maybe he felt bad? who knows
I remember finish the first book but not much of what happened, my general impression was that it was convoluted and stupid
Then he goes home and in the next book he is brought back, and time flows differently or whatever so it is 50 years later in narnia and he meets the woman he raped who gave birth to his son and she still doesn't hate him and she never told anyone and everybody still loves him for being the hero and then I stopped reading
That is probably the only series i've ever owned that I didn't finish
Same with Stephen King. I just could not finish The Stand.
His short stories? Eat them like M&Ms (and The Dark Tower, too).
But that brief synopsis you gave of the first 1/xth of the series is making me doubt wether it was
any good... Maybe it was down to my 11 year old mind being easily entertained? I do seem to remember there being some conflict in the main character's mind throughout the series...
...and a quick visit to wikipedia later... The Land may well be a figment of Covenant's imagination, and as such, all his actions and responses to them can only be interpreted with that knowledge. The whole shebang is a figment of his mind, probably.
no mention yet of Blood Meridian?
Well
Blood Meridian
Stephen Donaldson is a terrible writer. I actually read that series AND it's sequel, but by about halfway through the sequel it started getting really difficult. I keep reading on, because I just assumed that it was because I wasn't very bright and that Stephen Donaldson was just SO AWESOME that I couldn't fathom his awesome writing. It wasn't until years later that I found out it was because he's such a shitty writer and not because I was dumb.
Same goes for Ayn Rand. I kept thinking I didn't understand John Galt's speech about selfishness because Ayn Rand was some genius and I just couldn't fathom her greatness. It wasn't until years later I found that really is a convoluted mess of bad logic and reasoning. I'm sorry to say, for years I was one of those idiots who threatened to "go Galt" even though I didn't have a job to "go Galt" from. (Well, unless you count unpacking booze at the convenience store I worked at.... yeah.)
Well yeah, but that would take basically the entire country's economic resources and a massive free labor force besides-oh wait...
One of the biggest arguments is that apparently they've been so unchanged that apparently we have know way to know they aren't millions of years old.
Even if it weren't horribly inaccurate, it's still probably the crappiest argument ever.
I think the problem many had with the series is that it's treated as YA but I'm not sure that it was ever intended as such. It's pretty dark, heavy stuff.
Also I met Donaldson and he looks exactly how I pictured Covenant so something something author insert
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A) enjoyed and yet at the same time
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Like, exceptionally stupid
I remember lasting for a while in it and just being terrified and confused the whole time.