Kevin's Watch

Spiral Jacobs wrote:I started on the second book in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, The Confusion. I wonder how long this is going to take me. So far, I'm most looking forward to

Spoiler

Jack's swashbuckling adventures

as

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Eliza's endless political scheming and conversations

hold less interest for me.

I am sure you will be very pleased!

Re-reading Esselmont's Night of Knives.

--A

Re-reading Runes of the Earth.

Got a hardback book with four of Philip K. Dick's later novels: A Maze of Death (currently reading), VALIS (read in the past already), The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Also--you've got eyes of iron if you can go through Runes again, aliantha. I can't stomach the long (and to me) quite uneventful string of table scraps that lead to Revelstone (LFB took less time to get there and did it far more memorably, but that's best left for the TCTC forum maybe).

LF -- I'm rereading it partly to see whether it's as bad as everybody remembers it being....

It wasn't that it was bad. I just think it is shadowed by the elephantine standards created in the First Chrons, and to a slightly lesser extent the 2nd (lesser because I think the First Chrons' focus on a Hitler-like force of evil was just more striking, even though I think the Sunbane's insidious, more subtle approach to evil was well done and the only way SRD could continue the series in an innovative manner. I can't say "Kevin's Dirt" does much for me. Time travel, sure).

Lord Foul wrote:It wasn't that it was bad. I just think it is shadowed by the elephantine standards created in the First Chrons, and to a slightly lesser extent the 2nd (lesser because I think the First Chrons' focus on a Hitler-like force of evil was just more striking, even though I think the Sunbane's insidious, more subtle approach to evil was well done and the only way SRD could continue the series in an innovative manner. I can't say "Kevin's Dirt" does much for me. Time travel, sure).

When I read Runes for the first time, I didn't know ahead of time

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that time travel would be involved...

so when I go to that point, I was personally blown away.

Yeah, that's the danger of the Watch, I think. We'd heard enough about SRD's readings of chapters from Runes before publication that we were maybe kinda jaded by the time it came out...

Altho I agree, LF, that Runes is basically one big setup for the rest of the series. My principal objection, as I recall, was

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that the Staff of Law hunt felt like a video game.

Wondering if I'll feel the same way this time...

I doubt it'll change. Some books are written in the spirit of tedium, and that spirit will never go away. 1st Chrons reads fresh and full of ideas to me, and I think that's how SRD must've felt when he wrote it. Runes just seemed a bit lost, and I think a book should be able to stand on its own, rather than being a servant/footman to the books that follow it. If I'm reading mere prologue for several hundred pages, then I feel I've been jipped. LFB, TIW, though not the end of the First Chrons, were their own little mini-adventures with their own satisfying culminations (I'd venture the emotional closing of TIW marked me as much or more than TPTP).

Agreed. For me it was TIW and TWL that were the best.

--A

Lord Foul wrote:Got a hardback book with four of Philip K. Dick's later novels: A Maze of Death (currently reading), VALIS (read in the past already), The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

If you remember it, please let us (me) know how good/bad they are. The first and only PKD novel I've read so far is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and it left me cold.

Read A Scanner Darkly. One of his best in my opinion.

The Man In The High Castle wasn't that great...done well, but I was more interested in the scarcely mentioned events behind the scenes than the story he was telling.

I'm re-reading The Silmarillion for the first time in 20-odd years.

--A

Gardens of the Moon for lack of anything else, since I just finished Night of Knives.

--A

The Soldiers Son trilogy by Robin Hobb

matrixman wrote:

Lord Foul wrote:Got a hardback book with four of Philip K. Dick's later novels: A Maze of Death (currently reading), VALIS (read in the past already), The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

If you remember it, please let us (me) know how good/bad they are. The first and only PKD novel I've read so far is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and it left me cold.

That's because your soul is cold (well; to be fair, you either like his tripped-out style or you don't; if you want less trippy and more character-focused, read his The Man in the High Castle). But yes sir--if his books were a food, it'd be chocolate sprinkled in awesome sauce that I just couldn't stop eating. Om nom nom.

Dick's style + Le Guin's style are my favorite. If only they'd combined powers and written a fantasy trilogy of the First Chronicle's magnitude! Then I would die happily (and take as many people with me, of course!).

I'm still working on The Confusion, and I'm just reporting in to say that I actually thought "hell yeah!" when

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Jack cuts off the Duc d'Arcachon's head and proclaims he did that for Eliza

.

Spiral Jacobs wrote:I actually thought "hell yeah!"

Oh, yeah. It takes 2,500 pages, but Stephenson delivers. There's a few more, and bigger, hell yeahs in store.

Dead House Gates again.

--A

Back to Fantasy, and back to Robin Hobb for me. 140 pages into Ship of Magic. Hobb is a pleasure to read.

Yes, she is. Nice to see you, duke!

Did I mention that I'm rereading Fatal Revenant? If not -- I'm rereading Fatal Revenant.