The Library/Bookshelf! (COBbie Literature Thread)

Oooooh. From the frying pan into the fire, eh?

EDIT: Darn it, would have to top.

edited 8th Jan '13 10:55:16 AM by Euodiachloris

My reasoning is that if I can read all the hardest books, my capacity for reading and attention span will extend.

Also, do I smell a pun?

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

Nope. No punnage being deliberately done at all.

Just finished Appaloosa by Robert B. Parker. That book is just about the manliest thing I've ever read. For real; if that story had any more testosterone in it, someone would have bottled it and sold it by the gram to gym-rats.

Anyhow, good book. Took a nice spin on the classic Western. Anyone who has read Parker's Spenser series will immediately recognize the tropes in play, but they almost suit the cowboy genre better.

I recommend.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Ok since I have chatted it up in the Cobbies thread I figured I might as well give it a write up here as well.

Most of you know I have been reading the Deathlands series of novels. By this point I am 7 books in. My assessment is kind of mixed.

The author has certainly painted a bleak picture of the future where the world has blasted itself to hell and back. In fact the first two books are so bleak it was hard for me to start the 3rd one. However once I made it into and through the third book it started to improve. As in by the end of the book better positive outcomes big picture wise.

The general running theme is not just survival of the main character group but how they have take on a role to cleanse the Deathlands of the things that have gone wrong in a world where survivor societies are the dominant feature of society.

The most common form of government are Barons/Baronesses often violent, evil, and corrupt men or women. Their rule secured often through fear and or zeal in fashion that reminds one of any number of opressive regimes. They rule their city states with the help of their Sec. Men. Basically the various forms of jack booted thugs of a local authority.

The villains are often rather nasty by any definition. They are frequently nasty beyond the necessity that is life in the Deathlands. Rape, murder, kidnapping, slavery, torture, and outright brutality are the hallmarks of chief.

The heores frequently cross over into darker shade of gray territory. They live in the Deathlands where shoot first and look later is a common practice. They will act opportunicstically to ensure their group survives. However they are willing to let folks have a shot at living provided it is on their terms. They will lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their goals.

In terms of the books. Expect graphic violence, early on graphic sex, and anything else that can be graphically or described in detail will be. It has a mixed effect. Ie the author tries to turn the gritty up to 11.

The first two books are fairly bleak and even early into the third book it looks like it will be as well. However things turn out much better then expected by the end. It is more or less a bit of roller coaster approach in the books so far. Up one book down the other.

So far I have gottne through.Pilgrimage to Hell, Red Holocaust, Neutron Solstice, Crater Lake, Pony Soldiers, and Dectra Chain.

My two favorites so far are Crater Lake and Dectra Chain. They have their own kind of special flavor in the Deathlands setting. One involves a lost complex and other ends up being a wood sailing boat kind of adventure.

---

Rather then double post I have reached a stopping point for my Deathlands readings. I have finished the first 10 books which are still all written under James Axler. After book 30 the series has quite a few more authors writing the series and it supposedly improves.

1. Pilgrimage To Hell The book starts off telling you how World War III happened and it's general aftermath. IT also servers to introduce the lead character and his friends. Of course it also establishes the early pattern of behaviour from the various town ships, non-friendly mutants(almost all of them), the behaviour of Sec Men, the bad towns and vilalges will be overtly sexist, and of course the graphic details. Kind of a depressing book actually. Starts of bad and things just spiral to worse for the characters.
2. Red Holocaust The start of lead characters soon to be oft repeated adventure. Teleport, wake up, explore hidden fort, maybe fight mutants, find supplies, explore, have more trouble, find some local bad guys and likely hostile locals, possibly hostile backwards religion that has some form of human sacrifice and/or cannibalism, beat the bad guys, go back to hidden fort, teleport. Wash rinse repeat. The bad guys are a gang of Mongol like characters fleeing from the steppes of Russia and they bump into the heroes. Sec forces, crazy human scarificing religion, and a sinister old man included.
3. Neutron Solstice From freezing cold to the swamps. Sets another pattern. Memebers of the party can and will die. Also follows all the other patterns. Sets a new pattern. Local big bad likes to either rape,torture, muder, or do something horrible to their victims this may include threatening or actually torturing the main characters. Get a new character to replace the one lost. Help one of the rare reasonably friendly local groups. Other locals are of course either mutants or some form psychos with some backwards bend to their life style.
4. Crater Lake Only a slight departure from the general patterns but the initial bad guy is small fries and dealt with early. They end up fighting evil post war mutated inbred psycho scientists.
5. Homeward Bound Whill still holding the patterns in general is almost like Macbeth done Deathlands style. The characters are shown to be rather ruthless and oppotunistic. Compared to what they face they are still somewhat nice but ruthless.
6. Pony Soldiers The wild west done Deathlands style with the previously mentioned patterns. The bad guy in this one is notably quite very nasty. But so are their allies. Still kind of interesting story.
7. Dectra Chain A slight departure from the pattern in that there is no king thug per se. Events lead to an adventure on the high seas for the characters on whaling ships. This one was actually pretty good. One of the best so far.
8. Ice and Fire This one follows the pattern and sort of takes a Yo Jimbo kind of approach to the story and a lampshade is firmly planted on that. Again religion is often expressed in a psychotic way.
9. Red Equinox Diverges from the pattern in general but has a kind of depressing ending. Not bad at all.
10. North Star Rising We get back to the general pattern in general. ie more of the same.

My overall take is the excessively bleak background becomes kind of boring. The "gritty" also starts to feel a little tread worn. The predictable nature of a town and/or accompanying religion again edges the stories into tedious reading at times. Overall though the books are pulp novels. They can be read in sequence or in individual one shots.

General recaps have been given in each book. The author seems to have a bone to pick with religion as pretty much every religion portrayed is evil and backwards in some way. Towns, villes, and cities are invariably bad and filled with bad people serving, even worse people, who guard people just shy of being spawn of the devil himself. Expect the majority of mutants to be portrayed as slathering horrifically deformed monsters.

I would say the series current weakness is being overly formulaic.

I am debating if I should continue on, skipping to the non-axler era, reading the spin off series instead, or dropping it all. For now I am taking a break reading Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell.

edited 31st Jan '13 5:10:50 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

I'm currently reading le Carre's A Perfect Spy, which has some of the best character writing I have read in a long time.

There you are, Tuef.

"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - Bocaj

Yuan: Thank you much.

Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwall was a huge break from the formulaic settings of the Deathland novels. It was also much better written. It was just a better book overall. I am heading into the next book already. Since I have fewer of the Sharpe novels I am working out a balance of reading Deathlands and then taking a break to read Sharpe novels.

Being familiar with the characters in general this book makes quite a bit clear about several characters and their interactions.

I liked that the author did his home work before writing the book. He even gave a note at the end of the book explaining the history, points of alteration from history for the sake of the story, and other useful info. It also sparked my interest in looking up a group of people referred to as Jetti.

Who watches the watchmen?

I'm currently reading a cookbook called "Growing Up In A Korean Kitchen". The author is from North Korea and her family compound was occupied by the Japanese during WW 2. Her memories of the time before the occupation are a glimpse into a world long gone.

bc: I bet that is an interesting read. Especially considering North Korea as she knew it is long gone. Poor Korea. Constantly the center of wars between China and Japan and then Chinese backed North Korea and everyone else.

Who watches the watchmen?

Considering how Too Dumb to Live we often get, sometimes I think we deserve it. X/

edited 4th Feb '13 8:02:00 PM by dRoy

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

The book makes me wish that I had asked my dad more questions about when he was stationed in Korea in the early 50's. When we were kids he taught us how to sing "Happy Birthday" in what I think is a mish mash of Korean and Japanese. On the rare occasions he talked about his experiences, it was almost always about Japan. And it was always suitable for children, so I have no idea how much of it was the product of his imagination.

He broke his back falling out of a helicopter in Korea and after recuperating spent the rest of his tour of duty in Greenland.

Or, how b/c completely derailed the literature thread with memories of her dad.

BC: hey it is fine. It is in the Old Folks' Home section of the fora.

Sharpe's triumph is starting out about as well as it could be for Sharpe. Poor bastard.

Who watches the watchmen?

Currently working my way through the complete works of Raymond Chandler. There are so many things current writing theory tells you not to do which Chandler does (passive voice being the largest) but he basically says "screw you" and does them anyway...with fantastic results. Red Wind is so far my favorite.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Actually, good writing guides will tell you that the passive voice is a great way to emphasis the actor. A classic example: "the patient was killed by his own doctor!" is much stronger than "the doctor killed his own patient!" You put the shocking revelation at the end to emphasize it, and the passive voice makes that much easier.

(It's also handy when the actor is more-or-less irrelevant: "I was born in a log cabin" is much more straightforward than "My mother bore me in a log cabin".) :)

eta: Curious note: Both E.B. White and George Orwell, who both famously claimed the passive voice was a writing flaw, both used it more frequently than most other writers do.

eta x2: of course, E.B White also misidentified the passive voice in his guide—three of the four examples he provided didn't even use the passive voice. He was a better writer than grammarian. :)

edited 13th Feb '13 12:27:18 AM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Passive writing is still rather tricky to pull off and retain clarity.

I've just finished Breadfruit by Celestine Vaite. It was enjoyable enough for me to start reading it on the bus and continue till the end at home. For once I read a book which wasn't written in a foreign language first, although admittedly it still reads like a translation.

Just got the complete works of HP Lovecraft on my phone so I can read his writings during the time we are not doing anything.

No it's not. The passive voice is common and straightforward for the most part. Any sentence with the word "born" in it, for example, is using the passive voice. That word can only exist in the passive voice. Tell me it's "hard to pull off" a sentence using the word born. :)

A typical writer will have about 12-15% of their sentences expressed in the passive voice, and you've probably never noticed. (White and Orwell were about 20%.) It's not something you use in every sentence, but then neither is a connective like "and" or "but".

Of course, a lot of people misunderstand the term to mean "vague about agency", which is not what it means at all. As my first example showed, the passive voice can actually emphasize agency, and there are plenty of way to be vague about agency that don't involve the passive voice (these are frequently misdiagnosed as the passive voice because people don't really know what the term means).

eta: Here's a brief essay on the topic by one of the co-authors of The Cambridge Guide to English Grammar: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922

eta x2: I got the percentages wrong—corrected.

edited 13th Feb '13 12:53:42 PM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Additionally, any technical writing will be entirely in the passive voice (lab reports, etc.)

"Polite life will fill you full of cancer." - Iggy Pop "I've seen the future, brother, it is murder." -Leonard Cohen

Almost entirely. You try writing down steps in your methodology entirely in the passive voice when describing past actions. Bed of roses it isn't.

And, nobody worth their salt reports fantastic conclusions without at least one active sentence sneaking in like a dodgy Rogue hoping you've left the loot under the bed...

edited 13th Feb '13 2:36:03 PM by Euodiachloris

Huh. I was taught that "passive voice" meant putting the verb "to be" between the subject and verb. Meaning:

No, the way it was explained to me was that passive voice is when the subject receives the action. (e.g. 20 mL 1.0 M HCl was added to the flask). In this example, the acid's not adding anything, the chemist is, but the acid is still the subject.

edited 13th Feb '13 5:17:59 PM by tdgoodrich1

"Polite life will fill you full of cancer." - Iggy Pop "I've seen the future, brother, it is murder." -Leonard Cohen

td's definition is the one I was always familiar with, although any construction with "to be" as the primary verb (not just a tense change like in Lera's example, as past perfect can be active too) is passive.

The link I posted earlier explains it better than I can, but tdgoodrich's understanding is pretty close to my own, although perhaps not entirely correct. From the linked article:

Nevertheless, I think "the subject of the sentence/clause is not the actor" is a good first-order approximation of the concept. A quick-and-dirty test is to add "by X", and see if the sentence still works (if there wasn't a "by X" clause already). If so, it's probably the passive voice.

And again, it's not a bad thing—in fact, it can be very useful and powerful. The name "passive" is very misleading.

eta: And to avoid derailing this too much further: my brother just handed me a book called Riddley Walker. And boy, it's a odd one, but surprisingly easy to read despite the very unusual way that it's written. A bizarre After the End Lit Fic piece. I think I recommend it, but I'll wait till I finish to make a final determination. Our current article compares it to Finnegans Wake, but I tried to read that once, and I strongly disagree. Riddley Walker is much more straightforward and readable. For one thing, it has a story and a plot. :)

edited 14th Feb '13 9:39:15 PM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Just because it can be powerful doesn't mean it is that most of the time. Passive voice is avoided because it adds distance between the reader and the events and it is much harder to have the same or greater emotional impact. Active voice is stabbing someone with a knife, while passive voice is throwing that knife. Or "the knife was thrown".

No, passive voice allows you to move the actor to the end, to add emphasis on the actor, as with my "the patient was murdered by his own doctor!" There is absolutely nothing passive about that statement, and it's a bog-standard, highly typical example of the passive voice. "The knife was thrown by that man over there" is more emphatic than "That man over there threw the knife." End big!

You can be weak and wishy-washy with the active voice as well: "Someone made mistakes" is no improvement over "mistakes were made", as far as settling who's to blame. For that matter, "mistakes occurred" is also the active voice (you can't add "by X"), and it's even wishier and washier, since it doesn't even suggest that there was a cause. :)

edited 15th Feb '13 1:46:41 PM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.