Don't have an answer to the first question, but in my opinion Bartimaeus was pretty damn awesome.

 

GRRM's writing is far less dry than Tolkein's. And no, sharing a genre with someone does not make you the American counterpart to someone.

Niggas need to stop with the pointless comparisons between series simply on the basis that they're popular and their writers are from England and the US respectively. Twilight is not comparative to HP, and SoIaF is nothing like LoTR. Both of them being epic fantasy doesn't matter a lick.

 

This post again illustrates why it was so fucking fail. When someone refers to GRRM as "The American Tolkein" they aren't comparing writing styles. To assume that they either would or should be is both fail and retarded.

The last sentence of your post illustrates this problem damn well. They're arguably the two most successful epic fantasy series ever: of course people are going to draw comparisons, fucktard.

 

As recommended in the Sci-Fi rec thread, I'm putting out the Lost Fleet series for your perusal.

It's based in the far future where Captain John 'Black Jack' Geary is rescued from a survival pod from his old ship, which was destroyed in one of the first battles of a hundred year intergalactic war between rival human factions. He is awoken a hundred years into his future where his name has been used as propaganda and war has degenerated into one massive battle of attrition between forces. Mostly because everyone with any skill/training in tactics died early on.

So when the Syndicated Worlds slaughter the leading officers of the Alliance fleet when they turn up to surrender, Geary is left to take over the fleet and try to guide it back home, against far greater forces than his own. It has the best description of relativistic space battles I've ever read and includes some very well written politics between the various trigger happy captains of the fleet and Geary's wisdom on fighting smart rather than just courageously.

 

A friend of mine just brought me a book called Rune lords and claims its "Epic" but I am a little skeptical, so if anyone has read it should I start it or put it aside?

How good is the Black company?

 

If you liked the first one you will like the chances are high that you will like the second as well. Jadir plays an more important role than in the first book but nothing to extreme and it is interesting to see both sides of the war.

Bartimaeus is funny and has wonderful characters.

I love The Black Company and for me it is the best dark Fantasy series that I have read. But not everybody likes the style of it. If you like military Fantasy you should try the first book and find out if you like it.

Edit: For those of you who can read German and liked the PC Game The Witcher: Die Geralt Saga von von Andrzej Sapkowski ist wirklich gut und die Spiele machen danach midestens doppelt soviel Spaß.

 

Just because two things have similar levels of popularity doesn't mean they are in any way similar or should be used to reference one another. HP and Twilight are nothing alike, neither are Martin and Tolkein's works. It's frankly kinda insulting to compare them.

Maybe it's just me but when I read something like that I immediately assume that GRRM is following in Tolkein's footsteps and being derivative. He is not. Beyond sharing a genre their works are as different as can be and I don't think it's fair to just label somebody with a title that doesn't fit just because he's approaching the popularity level of some foreign writer.

I don't mind people comparing series, it's going to be done. But when you start labeling people like that for no reason it's just fucking annoying.

It was fucking terrible, the first half of the book, where Jadir's pseudo-islamic culture is detailed was kinda interesting, but the rest of the book was terrible. Major neutering of pretty much everyone occurred, except Leesha (one of the three main characters) who reached new levels of suedom. Don't get me wrong, one could argue that all his characters from Painted Man had a whiff of Sue-ishness but the other two got their page time cut down and Leesha's just skyrocketed. The worst thing about this is that in between most of that shit pretty much everything we read about Jadir, that made him interesting and sympathetic was lost. He just became another worthless pawn.


And there's the fact that the author can't seem to write any interaction between a main character and a skeptic that isn't just the "good guy" screaming the other person into submission which in a series about a messiah trying to unite mankind and save them is a real problem.

IMO, introducing the Krasian culture ruined the book. The author claims he wants to show two sides of the world and that he doesn't have any bias, but that's just ridiculous. The non-Krasian society is far superior. It's like watching every procedural cop show where the good guys have to face off against extremists; the bad guys must always bow to superior western culture, which is just boring and a cop-out to anyone who thought they were going to get some sort of balanced story .

And all the male characters are useless. Except one. And the demons were nerfed. Seriously.

Wow, that's the second time I've gone off on this book. I do love bitching about it. I can't wait for the material the third book will provide.

 

The first 5 or 6 books make you love the characters and the world. The final books drag quite a bit but are still fairly good if you got into the first book.

 

It's not no fucking reason. Martin is the most successful/best(depending on subjective factors) author in the genre of Epic Fantasy since Tolkein - who fucking created it all by himself.

When one calls Martin "The American Tolkein" you're pretty much the only person alive who'd take it as an insult: it's blatantly intended to be a compliment to Martin, something more along the lines of 'passing the torch' than an accusation of derivation. But on the topic: Yeah, Martin is following in Tolkein's footsteps. Everyone who writes in that genre is and to claim otherwise is to be ignorant of its history.

It doesn't fucking matter if their writing styles are different - fuck, Martin could write like Pynchon and it wouldn't matter - because as long as Martin writes in the genre that he does, it'll be impossible to avoid comparison to Lord of The Rings and Tolkein.

 

I think it's referring more to his popularity than anything to do with the stories themselves. He's the biggest epic fantasy author since Tolkien, thus he's subject to comparison by that measure.

 

The 2011 Hugo Awards were announced on the weekend.

Nominees
Winners

The nominated best novels were:

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

Blackout/All Clear was the winner.

I've read Cryoburn and posted about the Vorkosigan series elsewhere in this thread. It's an interesting read.

Has anyone read any of the other nominees or the winning novel, and were they any good?

 

I haven't read any of the novels, but Chiang deserved the Hugo for The Lifestyle of Software Objects. I honestly can't think of any short story/novella that I've read recently that was anywhere near that good. It can be read online for free, but I'm looking at the hardcover right now because I thought he deserved it. I'd also recommend Chiang's anthology of short stories (the name of which escapes me at the moment) which had some truly awesome pieces of writing.

I'm really wondering why I didn't recommend his shit earlier.

 

I've never heard of him, but I'll have to give that story a read.

 

Yeah. I don't know if it's me, but I really enjoyed it quite a bit. It genuinely deserved the award more than anything else I've read that won a Hugo this year.

I'd also recommend his Short Story Understand which is both available freely online and in that anthology I mentioned earlier. It's Algernon on hard-science steroids.

 

I don't know if it's already been said, but the 'Night's Dawn' by Peter F Hamilton is something I have managed to read repeatedly without worry. There are, however, a huge amount of characters. And several PoV.

My dad couldn't read the first book, as it scene changes were too much for him. I however, thought it was an okay idea on the first read-through, but on subsequent ones, I found it worked better - more plot advancement, and character development for ones that become hugely important in the second and third books.

Also, it has Al Capone.

 

Holy fuck, that series ends with the worst sort of Deus Ex Machina ever, Thaumologist. Yeah, the early books in the series are pretty good and the series is based on an interesting premise (if you can accept Al Capone in space and all), but you have to admit...

Spoiler

"And then God/the naked singularity fixed everything"

is the kind of ending that moves beyond frustrating and into "I wish to murder the author and all of his children" territory. Seriously, this is one where you'll want to read the plot summary on Wikipedia and then decide for yourself whether it's worth slugging through thousands of pages to arrive at such a resolution.

 

I love the rest of it though. I almost get the feeling his publisher set a page-limit, and he hit it, so went with "and then the magical alien space station made everything all better".

The ending is like the Darren Shan one - almost ruins the rest of the series. On the other hand, the rest of it is really good.

Spoiler

And Quinn's ending annoys me. He actually gets what he wanted all along, even though he was the major antagonist.

 

Hm, a quick search indicates that Sree was the only one to have recommended this book, and that was back in 2005. I might as well recommend this book again, since it's fantastic.

Basically, I'm going against the flow of rec'cing Science Fiction and Fantasy here, and I'll mention something completely different.

Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

That's right, you heard me. I don't want to hear how some of you had to study this book in high school, and how terrible that experience was. Yes, it's an old book. But you know what? It's fucking awesome. Fitzgerald has a talent for encapsulating the glitzy ambiance of the Roaring Twenties; his eye for detail was amazing. The characterisations are extremely strong too, from Gatsby and Tom, to Nick and Daisy. Even minor characters, such as Myrtle and Wilson, jump off the page.

Some of you might say that the plot is melodramatic. However, Fitzgerald has enough skill to pull off those twists without resorting to maudlin cliche. I cried in the denouement. The book is also short, residing at a pithy 218 pages. Voracious readers should be able to finish it in three days max.

I'm surprised that nobody else had mentioned The Great Gatsby after Sree's small post in 2005, to be honest. It's the best book I've ever had to read for school, and perhaps one of the best books I've read.

Hell, I even enjoyed it more than some of the cool, newer things I've read. Dresden and Potter are both included in that list.

Now I'm waiting to be crucified for that last comment. xD

 

It's a good book, Zeitgeist, one that everyone should read. Classics are classics for a reason.

Lolwat?

 

A lot of the books I read for Eng in high school I thought sucked, mainly because I had the stigma of classic literature must suck. (That and I skimmed most of them and bs'ed the rest for the class.)

Then I went back and reread a few, and realized that many were classics for a reason. Loved Wuthering Heights on a reread. I had forgotten about the Great Gatsby, so will go check that out once I get a chance.