Kevin's Watch

I really enjoyed the movie version of the 1st book and am eagerly awaiting The Day Watch. I need to read these books!

I saw both Night Watch and Day Watch. I liked them, though I'd say Day Watch was better. I'll pick the books up if I ever see them.

Hi Avatar, good to hear from you, too.
And Duke, I liked the first few books but haven't got the last ones yet.
I will eventually, but not right away.

Day Watch is out!?

Yeah, though likely not in the States. I downloaded it. I think I had to play it with media player classic to get the subtitles to work.

Finished Dark Tower 3 "The Waste Lands" last night, cosy in front of the heater as it was freezing outside. The last 100 pages rocked! And I quite enjoyed where SK finished the novel, not as a cliffhanger, but leaving the crew at an interesting place. Will take a short break from fantasy (I keep mistyping it as fatnasy?!) before continuing to the Dark Tower with "Wizard and Glass".

Duke, maybe fatnasty is right, the way I see some of those well-nourished mean-spirited wizards and ghosts in certain yarns.

duke wrote:And I quite enjoyed where SK finished the novel, not as a cliffhanger, but leaving the crew at an interesting place.

Not as a cliffhanger? Try waiting 6 years for the next book and tell me it's not a cliffhanger.

--A

Hi guys,

Haruki Murakami's After Dark is more novella than novel. Indeed, the US edition weighs in at only 191 pages. I was a bit put off by its length, to tell you the truth, yet I discovered that the book is as long as it needs to be. Murakami's tale draws you in and won't let go, and soon the number of pages becomes meaningless.

This magical realism story is an intimate narrative that follows the interwoven storylines between a number of disparate characters.

In this flawless translation, Haruki Murakami's impeccable, evocative prose expounds on the different states of loneliness.

The dialogues, even when they appear innocuous, show a lot of insight, while the deep and more thoughtful conversations are a delight.

Still, it's the atmosphere created by the author which makes After Dark a special read. The ambience is sublime, as if the night became a character in its own right. The darkness becomes a time of revelations, a period of transition in the lives of the cast.

Check out the blog for the full review!

Patrick
www.fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com

Currently reading 'The Coldfire trilogy"

Black Sun Rising

When True Night Falls

Crown of Shadows


I took this synopsis of the story from HERE

The books take place on the fictional planet of Erna, a planet where human fears and dark thoughts manifest themselves as "demons." A side effect is that higher technology typically fails to work because the more complex the instrument, the less likely observers are to have faith in it.

Two forces work to ally the threat of the demons, sorcerors who have learned to control their thoughts to thereby control the demons, and The Church, loosely patterned after Roman Catholicism, which leverages the collective faith of its followers to provide protection.

Near the end of the first book, it is revealed that the setting is actually science fiction; 1,200 years before the book begins settlers from Earth arrive, only to have all the information from their home planet and past lives destroyed in an explosion that later comes to be known as 'The Sacrifice' (described in a scene at the beginning of the second book, When True Night Falls). Erna has extreme seismic activity, as well as a mysterious force called the Fae that reacts to human imagination and fears. There are many kinds of Fae, the relatively unremarkable earth Fae, the tidal Fae (practically unusable by humans because of an unpredicatable system with the many moons), and the sinister dark Fae.

After a few hundred years of humans barely surviving on the planet, a spiritual leader called the Prophet arises. He has an idea to formulate a religion around the Earth Fae, thus the Church of Unity arises. Their goal is to render the Fae unresponsive to humans. But eventually the Prophet (an Adept who can see the Fae but who is forbidden by the Church to work it) commits a horrible crime, giving his wife and children over as a sacrifice to dark creatures in return for extended life, where he can only survive by feeding off blood, much like a vampire. The sun also hurts him, again just like a vampire.

Other interesting points on Erna are the Rakh, cat-like creatures that evolve to near-human after the landing, the mysterious Eastern continent, and the darkness once every few months (called 'True Night') when every moon and the Core has set.

I just got Watership Down from Amazon. I'm a young kid of only 57 so I should still like it. You think?

Just started a Canticle for Leibowitz. So far its amazing. I LOVE it.

That's a great book!

(Day Watch opened here yesterday! Woo Hoo! I'm going to the movies on Monday while Tam and Elora are in Colorado Springs! )

The Diamond Warriors just arrived in the mail. The 4th and final book in the Ea Cycle should answer a lot of questions and have a shattering conculsion!

I'm reading Aldiss' Helliconia Spring.

--A

Avatar wrote:I'm reading Aldiss' Helliconia Spring.

--A

I couldn't get into the Helliconia books - must try harder later in the year to acquire them.

I'm only re-reading it because I picked up the last (Winter) this weekend. I still haven't read Summer yet, but what the hell. Must admit my first impression of reading "Spring" wasn't all that great, but since I appear to be going for them all...

--A

Does magic realism count? I am reading Sir Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh.

Lord Mhoram wrote:Does magic realism count? I am reading Sir Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh.

The true definition of sci-fi is a hot topic of discussion, and fantasy isn't far behind. I've read far too many explanations of sci-fi which mesh poorly with the works the author has produced. For instance, Heinlein says in some essay that sci-fi should be backed by good scientific extrapolation and stuff. In another essay he lays out 20 predictions for the 20th century. About 3 of them came true, and I'd argue they were most/all gimme predictions. (ok, I hate to jump on Heinlein when I've read ONE work by him, but it's the best example I could think of.) All in all, I figure anything which loosely fits one of the genres is good enough, but whenever people come up with concrete definitions (Atwood's differentiation between spec-fic and sci-fi is another) I end up bashing my head against them.

Magical realism is close enough to fantasy for me. Now, whether I have any authority on the matter is another question...

Close enough for me too, although it'd probably be on the edges of the genre as far as I'm concerned.

--A