I just quit a book on the fifth page. The first page had, resplendent, emulating, illustrious, edifice, firmament, celestal spheres, panorama, ethereal, adorned, meandered, and alabaster. One or two words like this would have been fine, but I felt like the author was trying to stuff as many high valued words onto the page as possible. So I was already suspicious when the dialogue started, and the two characters talked like they were were bad actors in a High-Court setting. These were two teenage siblings, without anyone else present.
“I’ve relinquished any expectations for him. His whereabouts remain unknown and hold no sway over me.”
“An insidious fear burrows deep within my very core, whispering that something dire has befallen him.”
So what’s your fastest nope, and why did you drop the book?
The classic is “old mentor figure is one day/week away from retirement”. That dude is biting the bullet within the next 24 hours.
Story specific ones are cool too, my fav being from Star Wars. If a pilot ever says “I can’t shake ‘em” they’re getting blown outta the sky within the next 30 seconds. Can think of at least a dozen times it’s happened across all Star Wars media.
The nore cliché the red flag, the better in this case.
I haven’t found a high fantasy book that really drew me in and blew me away in the last few years. Any recommendations with one that has twists and mystery to it and just has a world you can get lost into? Looking for a book or series that just you can’t get enough of.
Thanks!
For me it’s Robin Hobb’s The Farseer Trilogy, I’ve tried to get into it multiple times and while I can recognize that they are incredibly well-written - I just don’t like the story/plot, the main character, or the (to me) borderline misery porn.
Which led me to the question of if there any books you guys feel the same about. A book or series you would say are well written but you just don’t enjoy?
I remember reading all fantasy books in the local library as a teen and basically devouring stories about dragons, elves, wizards, lords, knights and the like, set in a fantastical world that is different from our own.
But today, I am having a hard time finding new books like that. Are those tropes currently less popular? Or am I just bad at finding them?
I apologize if this is a stupid question. In my defense, I a) don’t really keep up with book-related social media, b) I am in Europe, in a non-English-speaking country, and c) I mostly check the local bookstores, both larger and smaller ones.
When I check out the fantasy shelves, I see a lot of books listed that are one of the following:
I always LOVED to read as a kid and I had a very high reading level but I had absolutely zero common sense so I would misunderstand or just totally miss tons of things when I read, and it was only when I reread them later when I was older that i would be like “Oh…. I guess that makes sense.”
(I still do this sometimes to this day, because of my ADHD but it was definitely worse when I was a kid.)
What are your examples of that? Either as a kid, something you picked up later, or even just something dumb you missed as an adult but then picked up on a reread.
My absolutely dumbest one as a kid was when I read Harry Potter, I did not really fully understand the idea of calling people only by their surnames (and we usually use the phrase “last name” where I’m from so for a while I didn’t even know what a surname meant lmao)
So in the 4th Harry Potter book when Voldemort comes back, he sees his followers there, including Malfoy, Crabbe, and …
This book was so insufferable that it took me from early June until now to finish it. I heard about it through the Discover section on the Goodreads app and it was specifically recommended for being popular on “booktok.” I don’t have Tiktok, but I’ve been aware of this book community for a while, because it’s mentioned in reviews, there are sections in bookstores designated to it, and I frequent online spaces like this community.
Anyway, this book has outrageously high reviews, and it’s fucking awful. I almost gave up finishing it so many times but after paying $19.99 for it, I was damn sure going to get to the end.
—This book is a BLATANT ripoff of The Secret History by Donna Tartt, but with subpar prose and one-dimensional characters. It has the same plot, the same characters, and a practically identical setting.
—Shakespeare should be listed as a co-author of this book, because the amount of material that was lifted from his texts was …
Title, I suppose. What’s one book that had a final line that disturbed you heavily? I realise this is very very hyper specific so I’ll also vary to books that disturbed you in general. But with final lines specifically. I’ll start:
“Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.”
-Outer Dark, Cormac Mccarthy. This line just filled me with such a profound sense of despair and hopelessness.
Haven’t seen the full list announced yet, otherwise I’d share, but appears this awards was just recently awarded at the WorldCon in China. Awesome to see this series and Tchaikovsky get some recognition at the Hugo’s.
By that, I mean that when most people say “hard scifi” they actually mean physics porn rather than accurate science. I’ve noticed lots of hard scifi fans care less about the accuracy of the science and more about the proximity to the “hard sciences” like physics.
So give me your best “scientifically accurate” scifi novels and short stories that are about biology or sociology or (god forbid) psychology.
From perhaps my favorite novel of all time:
“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well.”
Written in 1959, and yet, at least to me, continues to capture an unrelenting characteristic of progress.
Seems like in the last 20-30 years Sci Fi has become much more serialized as books are part of longer series rather than stand alone. Any good stand alone books that have come out in the past few years?
Reading the post about The Forever War, it occurred to me (not for the first time) that we’re living in the future that some of our favorite classic SciFi authors were writing about. I know there are plenty of books that take place in far future centuries and millenniums and plenty of books where a date isn’t actually stated, but let’s see how many books we can list that specifically (at least partially) take place in 2024.
As the title suggests, I’m looking for books with true intergalactic travel. Pretty much every story I have ever read either stays within a galaxy or sometimes even solar system. The only story where this is somehow possible seems to be the Void books by Peter F. Hamilton using the ultradrive but it’s not really a central plot point.
Thanks!