name_here wrote:I read my brother's copy of Mistborn today. More magic systems need to depend upon action-reaction pairs like that.
Also, Hazekillers get so badly owned by Mistborn I kind of wonder why they even exist.
That trilogy only gets better from there, though all his books have the same pacing and lack of denouement. I've heard people call that a problem; I rather like it.
His other books are just as good. Warbreaker's use of altCaps is a little weird, but entirely tolerable, and that is literally the only complaint I had.
And if I remember right, hazekillers mostly only deal with the folks that burn a single metal. Mistborn own everyone.
Nix's Old Kingdom series is great (apparantly he's writing another now?). I read his Seventh Tower series too, but IIRC it was targeted at younger children. It wasn't bad, I just remember thinking it would have been great To have read when I was 12.
Is anyone here a manga or non-Anglophone comics reader? I'm trying to find new books to read but, other than Gantz, the American manga market seems like it's geared toward little girls, little boys, emo/goth kids, and yaoi fans. Books I've read and liked in the past:
1. Masamune Shirow's stuff (Ghost in the Shell, Orion, Black Magic, etc.)
2. Battle Angel Alita
3. Akira
4. Gunsmith Cats and other Kenichi Sonoda books
5. 2001 Nights
6. Planetes
7. Battle Royale
8. Hayao Miyazaki's comics
9. Greatest Teacher Onizuka
10. Initial D
11. Lone Wolf and Cub and other samurai books
I've recently read Stray Dogs and found it too "emo" and Black Lagoon felt like it was created by Americans and directly for the anime market.
Are there any action/sci-fi/"boy's adventure" books published in the last 10 years that are worth reading?
Wesley Street wrote:Are there any action/sci-fi/"boy's adventure" books published in the last 10 years that are worth reading?
Not from the last 10 years, but Tezuka's Dororo is highly entertaining. It has Tezuka's signature fourth-wall breaking which annoys me, but is otherwise just a straight-up good time adventure story. In fact, Tezuka has a lot of really good stuff.
Oh! Pluto is an eight-volume retelling of the old 'strongest robot in the world' Astroboy story, with a lot of mature elements added. And by mature I don't mean cussing and sex, I mean questions of identity and humanity. It's strongly influenced by Silence of the Lambs and is kind of amazing.
I don't know if you'd count it as non-Anglophone, but Usagi Yojimbo is consistently excellent.
Wesley Street wrote:Is anyone here a manga or non-Anglophone comics reader? I'm trying to find new books to read but, other than Gantz, the American manga market seems like it's geared toward little girls, little boys, emo/goth kids, and yaoi fans. Books I've read and liked in the past:
1. Masamune Shirow's stuff (Ghost in the Shell, Orion, Black Magic, etc.)
2. Battle Angel Alita
3. Akira
4. Gunsmith Cats and other Kenichi Sonoda books
5. 2001 Nights
6. Planetes
7. Battle Royale
8. Hayao Miyazaki's comics
9. Greatest Teacher Onizuka
10. Initial D
11. Lone Wolf and Cub and other samurai books
I enjoyed:
--Peacemaker Kurogane (about the shinsengumi, with an awesome portrayal of Ryoma Sakamoto).
--Banana Fish (about street gangs, Vietnam, child abuse, and numerous other things...it's complicated...I suppose there are yaoi elements/implications, but not explicit)
--Nana (probably the best josei manga out there)
--Full Metal Alchemist (if you haven't checked this out, it's not for kids, and I greatly enjoy it)
--Death Note (horror? thriller? quasi-mystery? Not sure how to classify this)
--Bleach (don't judge me!)
EDIT TO ADD: Gunslinger Girl (sad and somewhat creepy, but good)
Are there any action/sci-fi/"boy's adventure" books published in the last 10 years that are worth reading?
I found Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit fairly readable.
Last edited by PoliteNewb on Fri Oct 07, 2011 6:07 pm, edited 2 times in total.
I am judging the philosophies and decisions you have presented in this thread. The ones I have seen look bad, and also appear to be the fruit of a poisonous tree that has produced only madness and will continue to produce only madness.
--AngelFromAnotherPin
believe in one hand and shit in the other and see which ones fills up quicker. it will be the one you are full of, shit.
I'm feeling sort of better about the whole Pratchett Alzheimer's thing, but for several months I didn't read any of the book. There just wasn't any joy in it.
But next Tuesday the new one comes out and...Hell, I'm doing okay.
Last edited by Maxus on Fri Oct 07, 2011 4:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Naruto
Bleach
Fairy Tale
History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi
*Pluto
*Liar Game
*Gamble Fish
Holy Land
*Blaster Knuckle (character was eerily a lot like a deadlands character I played, except my guy was an obese and incredibly slow moving bible thumping preacher... okay, so nothing like a deadlands character I played except for how ridiculous he was... still my party draws comparisons)
Claymore
Fire Fire Fire
Hunter X Hunter (preferred the anime... in fact I dunno why I still read it... tis like pissing on good memories)
Full Metal Alchemist
Pokemon Adventure
Get Backers (preferred the anime)
Black Cat
Highschool of the Dead
Bio Meat
Gantz (no longer following because what the fuck?)
Blame!
Death Note
There's others but I cannot remember them all, especially the ones that were no longer being updated. =-(
I got the rest of the Mistborn trilogy on my shiny new Nook, then got the preview Alloy Of Law, which is set in a wild-west analogue roughly three hundred years after the end of the third book. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to contain any actual Mistborn,
or even budget Mistborn, apparently the fact that you can get asymmetric power by stabbing dudes with metal spikes was lost to history at some point. Well, actually, apparently Marsh has not only his left-over asymmetric power but also is running the infinity loop, and is going to show up at some point.
so the odds for an epic mid-air atium-powered gunfight involving gratuitous property damage is rather low. Then again, the main character is a coinshot/weight-reducing dude with a gratuitous number of revolvers, so he is pretty hardcore as-is.
Apparently there's an upcoming RPG, but in order for it to be entertaining it's probably going to require the PCs to be Mistings, and that comes with a heavy does of Smash Bro's Syndrome, because you need a Smoker around all the time with the job description of "Do not get killed" while the people with active abilities get to mess around with awesome magic systems.
Last edited by name_here on Fri Oct 07, 2011 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
For Discworld Fans: You see more of Willikins. Lot more.
This is a good thing.
Oh, and the Summoning Dark is mentioned sometimes.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Got Alloy of Law on Nook preorder today. It was kind of... short. It honestly feels more like the first half of a duology than a stand-alone and is about half as long as Mistborn. Most pertinently, at the end of the book we find out who the main villain is but not, say, what it is he wants. And the plot isn't even close to being resolved.
So, the villain is the main character's uncle, and his plan consists of "something something world domination" that apparently involves a forced Allomantic breeding program with the kidnapping victims. Unless he intends to murder them for asymmetric power, or it's all a cover for kidnapping the world's only Atium misting because the pits are due to be operational again by this point in time.
We don't really know what he's up to, is what I'm saying. Except that it involved bankrupting House Tekiel. Then again, they were named after the first Great House to bite the dust in the Final Empire, so they were just asking for it.
There is a pair of hilarious callbacks, with a (really awesome) gun named Vindication and the revelation that Spook's accent has become like unto Church Latin.
Incidentally, the magical system info at the back is apparently written by Hoid.
He comments that, of the three systems, Hemalurgy has the greatest implications for the Cosmere, so we're probably not getting through The Stormlight Archive without someone getting spiked. He also says it's not really evil, which is kind of undermined by how it literally requires one murder per spike.
Last edited by name_here on Tue Nov 08, 2011 9:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel - My mom gave me this book something like a decade ago, I skimmed it, but promptly forgot about it. While looking something up online the other day, Google Books gave me a result from this very book. I figured I should actually sit down and read it, and it's surprisingly interesting. It was also kinda cool to have a Google Books result pop up with something that I actually have.
For some on-the-way-to-work-reading, the Vampire Files, by P.N. Elrod.
I'm liking it for light reading. The first book came out in 1990, so it's before a lot of the vampire craze where people tried to desperately re-invent them.
Dude gets turned into a vampire in Chicago in the Depression.
Dracula is acknowledged as about half-accurate.
*He is stronger and faster. Enough that he can take out one person in a room with guns, but not enough to deal with two.
*Wood and running water do give him problems
*He can use the Vampire mind-whammy.
*Needs to sleep near home earth.
*Can do the mist-form.
*Heals from most damage. He still can get hurt and feel pain, and evidently getting shot in the skull or conked on the head can still knock him loopy.
But silver, religious symbols, and garlic don't do much against him.
Favorite moments so far:
-He uses the mist-form (two settings: Invisible and gaseous, or half-solid and ghostly-looking) to haunt the FUCK out of some guys. Fading halfway into vision, fading out, moving shit, weird noises....
-Then, when confronted with some 'vampire hunters', he's explaining to the slightly less rabid of the two, "Yeah, I have to drink blood. That's why I go to the stockyards a few times a week. It's a medical condition, kid. I have some restrictions on exerting myself and diet, but apart from that I'm trying to be normal. Would you shoot a kid for having polio?"
So, well worth the dollar-fifty a pop from the used book store. I think I'll end up with the rest of the series.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
I was browsing through the new books at the Oakland Library before my volunteer shift, and I just found something pretty interesting. It looks like Girl Genius is getting novelized.
Finished The Damned Highway as well as Carlton Mellick III's I Knocked Up Satan's Daughter, and have started in on Joey Comeau's short novel Lockpick Pornography.
I got The Book of Cthulhu, a collection of Lovecraft-based short stories, for my birthday.
A few of them have been really good. One of them was especially interesting--like if the Cold War was about magic rather than science. So it's a Russian arms wizard sitting in a Baba Yaga chicken-legged hut in Switzerland with an American arms wizard, basically on call if they're needed, and they're discussing the fallout of various old tests and the hazards of the weapons. Of especial interest was the Azathoth Bomb--opening small portals for a few microseconds, the other side being in the vicinity of Azathoth, to let "the Radiance" shine on something briefly. And that something becomes Color out of Space dust. The Russian kept saying, "You worked with the Unthinkable? Are you sure you're not tainted?" And the American assuring him that he's been checked every way possible by the exorcists, and declared clean.
Last edited by Maxus on Sat Dec 10, 2011 6:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Avoraciopoctules wrote:Is it recent? I'm thinking of dropping by the local sci-fi bookstore today or tomorrow.
Yeah, it's a 2011 release. Edited by Ross E. Lockhart.
Edit: Also, a lot of these stories have shout-outs or references to Lovecraft stories. So far, a few have explicitly referred/included the facts from Mountains of Madness, a couple others Call of Cthulhu. It definitely helps to have read Lovecraft's own stories before these.
The one I'm reading right now is titled 'Shoggoths in Bloom'. Like, this town in Maine has Shoggoths in the bay--and the people don't mind too much. Sometimes one of them will clean out a crab trap by seeping inside and digesting all the crabs and then leaving, but generally they leave folks alone. During November, you can see Shoggoths on rocks, putting stalks up 15 feet in the air. And the bioogist wants to know why.
Last edited by Maxus on Sat Dec 10, 2011 8:05 pm, edited 3 times in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Finished Lockpick Pornography (it was short, and strange), and started Lin Carter's Tara of the Twilight - his effort, by the admission in his introduction, to combine genre fantasy with erotic fantasy.
Currently making my way through several supplementary volumes of letters sent by H. P. Lovecraft. I have most of the major collections that have been printed, except for Robert Bloch.
