I only heard about Fourth Wing a few weeks ago, and upon learning about it I also learned that it is explosively popular and very highly reviewed. A fantasy phenomenon that I’m missing out on! The premise looked interesting enough to warrant a purchase. I’m not really into academic settings in fantasy but I loved R.F. Kuang’s Babel so I was willing to take a chance on something that is, as every source tells me, an excellent book.
It is not an excellent book. I think it may actually be very bad?
Fourth Wing is billed as adult fiction, but it feels like this was a YA novel that the writer retroactively slapped a bunch of sex and F-bombs into to make it seem more mature. The first few chapters are loaded with cliches and tropes you would expect to see from, again, a YA novel like Eragon. Our MC has a classic case of Anime Main Character Hair, she’d rather be reading than fighting (but she seems to be mysteriously proficient at the latter anyway), and we’re …
So can people PLEASE stop talking like it’s one or the other?😂 I’ve seen the sentiment multiple times that Malazan fans and Sanderson fans are two separate circles. (Edit cause people seem to be taking this part way more seriously than I thought: I’ve seen this sentiment many times in multiple subs, and wanted to say something on it. I meant this as half-joking - hence the laughing emoji - and didn’t expect people to take offense at it. Think whatever you want!)
Malazan is my all-time favorite series, and Sanderson is one of my favorite authors, so I was excited when he said this. He did acknowledge the steep learning curve, but said that for him that just made each book more exciting. His favorite video games ARE Dark Souls and Souls-like games so I guess that makes sense haha.
I’m tired of fantasy books that are glorified fanfic, or the protagonist is 17⁄18. I’m struggling to get through the Lochlann Feuds series and I couldn’t bring myself to pick up A Court of Wings and Ruin after completing the others in the series. Google has let me down too often with suggesting popular books thay don’t seem to be much different.
I’m looking for books with better writing and maybe have an adult protagonist. I’m 30 and cannot relate anymore. Also, this year was the first time I’ve picked up a book in over a decade and I’m excited to look into your suggestions and see what’s out there!
Edit: wow I am blown away by everyone’s recommendations. I promise I’ll look into all of them even if I can’t reply to you. Thank you again!!
I was fine with many books until after I read Piranesi. Almost everything feels poorly written in comparison. And I would need to read several poorly written books before I can start to enjoy them again, lol. Susanna Clarke is such a talented writer. I wish she has more books written.
Anyway, which author has the effect of making other author/book feel like they’re worse than they are simply because he/she does something well, such as characterization, plot, style, etc.?
If you don’t know who Mark Dawson is, he’s a self-published author who has 203,722 ratings on Goodreads. He says himself that his books have had over 6 million downloads (including both paid and free promotional copies). He runs the Self Publishing Formula course and podcast, he talks at the 20BooksTo50K conference in Vegas, and he’s part of a new initiative called Fuse Publishing. He’s a pretty big deal in self-publishing, so what he does reflects on self-publishing as a whole.
I was wondering how this guy published so many books in so little time and I found my answer: he stole a lot of his material.
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I won it at my office holiday party.
For years I’ve read e-books through Libby on my iPhone or iPad. So when I won the kobo I thought ah, well. Seems like a waste as I have a device. I don’t really want to pay for e-books. A coworker asked me how I liked it at lunch the next week, and I mentioned I hadn’t unboxed it yet because the process of getting books onto it seemed costly and tedious.
She seemed surprised because we often discuss how much we love Libby, so she said “why don’t you connect it to your library account?” And like a fool, I said: “I didn’t know they did that now.”
See, years and years and years ago I worked for a popular bookstore chain in Canada, when the kobo was first introduced. I remembered being annoyed at the concept because you had to connect it to your laptop/desktop and import books you’d buy from online bookstores. Sure, you could pirate books, but why not just take them out from the library or buy a copy?
As I got older I kept buying and reading paper …
Over the last few months, one of the great joys in each day has been seeing my son morph into an avid reader. He used to be the loudest, most demanding of constant stimulation and attention-seeking child, but seemingly overnight, he prefers to be head down in a book. He’s rapidly progressed to more challenging children’s novels, and is devouring them at a pace that neither I nor the school library have been able to anticipate! As a means of addressing this, I’ve started to let him use my ereader during each day, and we’ve connected it to our local library, which lets him borrow ebooks directly, so he’s more in control of what he’s reading. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t be comfortable with him reading the Percy Jackson series, because at face value it seems more suited to older readers, but we’re tired and it’s the start of the school holidays here (Aus), and he continues to reassure us that there’s nothing in them that is troubling …
I have never seen the show, and knew close to nothing about this book before beginning. I’ll also mention that English is not my first language, and I’m a beginner reader.
I began this book with high hopes, and I’m absolutely not trying to say that this book is bad. It’s just that I understand absolutely nothing. I might as well be reading German or Spanish (I don’t know either of those languages)
There are paragraphs that I’ve read multiple times, but I still have zero clue what it’s trying to say. I’m like a monkey with a Quantum physics textbook.
I had this exact same problem with Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. I started that with really huge expectations too, because I love sci-fi, but I was so lost the entire time.
I struggled with Jane Austen a lot but I literally became familiar with that very quickly, and ended up enjoying all of her books very much, but I finished ALL of Hitchhiker’s guide but I can’t …
Okay first of all I was not imagining that I’d be thinking about reading a single book in my entire life but as an ICARLY Fan I was SHOCKED when Jennette announced about her book , and I was like WHAT??!!WHY in hell someone as sweet and kind as Jennette could be possibly be glad about her Mom’s Death! then I decided I got to get the book to find out what was really going on with her when she was just a kid!!
Immediately, I fell in love with her style of writing and how she expressed all of her ideas and thoughts.
And what made me love the book even more how she surprised us! she is really so talented at this and also she really made me laugh many times throughout the book.
Also she won the Goodreads choice Award for the best MEMOIR in 2022 , and there were really a lotta votes exceeding 100,000 votes which was exceptional and surprising!
I just finished “Good Bad Girl” by Alice Feeney, and I am done! The whole thing was a bunch of characters who knew what was going on and simply wouldn’t tell the reader! They all had places to go and things to do, without ever saying why they were doing it. It led to conversations that were stilted and unbelievable because they weren’t speaking like any normal person does.
I am so sick of it. It is not suspenseful or intriguing. It is lazy. It seems having an unreliable narrator these days is a cheap, lazy way to keep your plot “mysterious” when you know there really isn’t anything happening and it could all reasonably be wrapped up if that person just simply said what was going on and why they were doing what they were doing.
I prefer mysteries and thrillers where I can piece the clues together, not just some main character (in first person!) withholding information they already know.
Rant over.
I have recently read The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson. The book had been in my list for years (it got recommended to me as a biology-focused sci-fi book, and I was curious about that as someone with a biological sciences background), but other things had always gotten in the way until recently.
I now wish I’d read it sooner. It was a pretty great read.
It tells the story of a xenobioligist, Dr. Juna Saari, who becomes stranded on an alien planet and must survive there for years (she manages to contact her crew, but by that time they’re past the point of no return, so she has to wait for a rescue mission). She is taken in by the Tendu, the frog-like intelligent species of the planet who live a primitive lifestyle but have an inherent bioengineering capacity through allu-a (“linking”).
This last thing is clearly inspired by the Oankali, from the Lilith’s Brood trilogy by Octavia E. Butler (who is thanked in the foreword). I have serious doubts that …
I picked up Cryptonomoicon for $8 at the book store and am *loving* it! I’ll have to read more of Stephenson’s work after this.
But something’s been gnawing at me the past few days; the depiction of social justice-types in the dinner party with Randy+Charlene is pretty over-the-top (clearly Stephenson had a bone to pick), and I was wondering if it was as apt in 1999, as it is today.
I know people, today, who are actually like this. The type who questions everyone’s morality but their own! But, being born in 2000, I have no idea if they existed in 1999. Was this overly satirical for the time? Or have those same types of people always existed?
I just pasted the whole exchange below (no real spoilers for the novel):
This Dwarf would view the whole thing as entertainment. He would know that he could always go back out into the real world, so much vaster and more complex than these Hobbits imagined, and slay a few Trolls and remind himself of what really …
I’m new to the science fiction genre, but what I understand is that they narratively explore scientific concepts and ideas, like the impact of AI on society and the ethics of scientific progress for example. Is there a genre or subgenre that does a similar approach, but for political science ideas?
There are two series that I want to get into, The Three Body Problem and The Legend of the Galactic Heroes, but what really intrigues me is their exploration of political ideas. Even though The Three Body Problem explores a lot of hard science concepts, what intrigues me is the Dark Forest theory, which, on first glance, reminds me of realist International Relations theory. Additionally, Galactic Heroes appeals to me because of its heavy emphasis on military strategy and tactics, fanatical idealism, as well as key questions asking whether a corrupt democracy or a benevolent dictatorship is preferable. Both series are classified as science fiction, but much of the ideas explored are …
I’m almost done with Project Hail Mary and really like the ingenuity and cleverness of the characters. It reminds me alot of the Lower Decks episodes Star Trek, Babylon 5, and of course the Lower Decks Trek show. Most recently For All Mankind S4 features a dedicated Lower Decks character and I am more invested in his story than Boomer Ed.
I read the Honor Harrington books a few years ago and one of them had a Lower Decks character (a radar tech I think) and really enjoyed the contrast of what he had to deal with vs what Honor had.
What books are centered or at least heavily show the lower decks point of view of space exploration and/or warfare? Hell…it doesn’t even have to be SF, I just prefer it.
It is one thing to hear that the USS Dumbass broke apart and lost 5k people, it is another thing to see someone serve under Captain Dumbass and the friends they make (and lose) because of Captain Dumbass’s decisions. And, probably more importantly, how they move …
I have really enjoyed Harkaway’s novels and quite liked TN. For him it was a pretty short and breezy novel and is very much a bizarro noir story with body horror elements. Good stuff. What struck me the most were the hand to hand combat scenes in the book. I never really cared for hand to hand combat action scenes in books but was really struck by how visceral and vivid they were in TN. The completely unexpected cage fight scene about 1⁄4 into the book was shocking and I read it twice and would highly recommend it to anyone.
THE rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.
– The Long Rain, Ray Bradbury
I am in New England, and we have had 3 inches in 18 hours.