Grand unified books thread

[garbon]

I've been plodding through Brandon Sanderson's The Final Empire. Man his writing style is... rough.

[11B4V]

Reading The Human Face of Karate by Tadashi  Nakamura.

[grumbler]

I've been plodding through Brandon Sanderson's The Final Empire. Man his writing style is... rough.

I skipped massive chunks of his books finishing off the Wheel of Time series.  One entire book was about just one battle.  As you say, rough going (and for a crap finish, at that, though that was probably Jordan's fault).

[Agelastus]

I've been plodding through Brandon Sanderson's The Final Empire. Man his writing style is... rough.

I skipped massive chunks of his books finishing off the Wheel of Time series.  One entire book was about just one battle.  As you say, rough going (and for a crap finish, at that, though that was probably Jordan's fault).

I read the Mistborn books to get an idea of him as an author before he completed the Wheel of Time books. I wasn't overly impressed although found them readable.

However, Tim raved about the Stormlight Archive and (given their length) I succumbed when I needed something to read when sitting around in the waiting room when on jury duty. They are quite good, and I found myself reading them both quite fast and in full (rather than speed-reading as I sometimes do these days.)

[garbon]

I've been plodding through Brandon Sanderson's The Final Empire. Man his writing style is... rough.

I skipped massive chunks of his books finishing off the Wheel of Time series.  One entire book was about just one battle.  As you say, rough going (and for a crap finish, at that, though that was probably Jordan's fault).

I read the Mistborn books to get an idea of him as an author before he completed the Wheel of Time books. I wasn't overly impressed although found them readable.

My concern is that his characters seem to swing about wildly in their motivations and he has had a couple times where his character thinks esentially 'that makes sense now' when it very much doesn't.

He also seems to being doing his best to exemplify 'telling rather than showing'.

[Valmy]

I generally find Sanderson in the pretty decent category. What he lacks in quality he makes up for in volume.

[Scipio]

I'm enjoying the Simon Winder books Germania, Danubia, and Lotharingia.

[Malthus]

I'm enjoying the Simon Winder books Germania, Danubia, and Lotharingia.

Those were a lot of fun - my copies are full of bookmarks.

[Habbaku]

They're great. 

[Syt]

Anyone following https://fivebooks.com/ and can say whether or not their recommendations are worth it?

[Eddie Teach]

I generally find Sanderson in the pretty decent category. What he lacks in quality he makes up for in volume.

Is this joke? 

[Sheilbh]

Just finished Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child and will shortly read his latest, The Sparsholt Affair.

So I love Hollinghurst. He's a controversial figure in gay lit (and I do have some queries about his racial politics) because he's one of those gay lit writers who seem to be aiming for "respectability" formally, like Edmund White. They write in a way that is recognisably canon - in the case of Hollinghurst, his great influences are Henry James and Wodehouse.

In a way this is a recurring theme in Hollinghurst's work. His books are full of beautiful houses and the English establishment (famously a party with Thatcher in The Line of Beauty), but the characters he's focusing on are sort of sexy gay interlopers who'll be cruising the party or on their way to an orgy. They fit in - they're somehow wealthy, witty and literary - but also crash the party. And I think in a way that's been what Hollinghurst is doing. His novels are realist and very easy to read on the surface - they fit in. But then there's this deep pull of irony and some of the sharpest, most precise descriptions of individuals and social events you can read. And typically they include a lot of sex - The Stranger's Child is a fairly chaste exception - so much that I've seen his genre described as "gay sex pastoral"

The Stranger's Child starts with a minor Georgian poet, Cecil Valance, visiting the suburban home of his Cambridge friend in 1913. During his weekend stay he gets drunk, declaims his poetry, repeatedly ravages his friend, the son of the family, and roughly kisses the 16 year old daughter of the house too. He then writes a poem named after the house, Two Acres, about this "Two acres of English land". The novel then moves forward - 20s, 60s, 80s, 2000s - as the characters from that first visit move through their lives and, as if in parallel, Valance's own reputation shifts from being a sort of Rupert Brooke figure to merely "something of a poet", "a first rate example of a second rate poet" and ultimately the subject of a revelatory/revisionist biography about his broad sexual appetites. Changing taste is a wider theme in the novel (and bad taste or bad art, possibly the only crime in Hollinghurst's eyes) as we see the public turn against and then enjoy Victoriana such as the Valance's country home.

But it feels like it's a novel about Hollinghurst's wider theme, which I've always enjoyed, except this time instead of simply doing it by example he's written a novel that is exactly about the gays who've always been in the canon. He's looking back and filling in the blanks with the essential role gays played in constructing a certain version of Englishness (James, the War Poets, Forster, the Bloomsbury group etc).

[garbon]

The Sparsholt Affair? Bleh.

[Valmy]

I generally find Sanderson in the pretty decent category. What he lacks in quality he makes up for in volume.

Is this joke? 

Why would it be a joke? Being able to consistently produce is a nice quality for an author, especially one who you can generally expect to be a fun read. It is not like he is publishing academic tomes or something.

[KRonn]

I've been plodding through Brandon Sanderson's The Final Empire. Man his writing style is... rough.

I skipped massive chunks of his books finishing off the Wheel of Time series.  One entire book was about just one battle.  As you say, rough going (and for a crap finish, at that, though that was probably Jordan's fault).

I read the Mistborn books to get an idea of him as an author before he completed the Wheel of Time books. I wasn't overly impressed although found them readable.

However, Tim raved about the Stormlight Archive and (given their length) I succumbed when I needed something to read when sitting around in the waiting room when on jury duty. They are quite good, and I found myself reading them both quite fast and in full (rather than speed-reading as I sometimes do these days.)

I really liked the Mistborn books! Well done, good and fast read. Good characters that I could cheer for. It was different and interesting how those with the abilities could ingest types of metals to perform feats of movement and combat.