Criticise books you like, and praise books you hate!

Yes she does. Alice has character to her and while Meyers is still a bad writer she can get things right at times.

Books I don't like: Star by Pamela Anderson (and her ghostwriter).

• There are very nice descriptions of building interiors. Sometimes they're a bit intrusive in the middle of a scene, but the ghostwriter (I mean, whom are we kidding here?) could probably get a job marketing apartments.
• It's kind of nice to read a chick-lit novel that doesn't focus on a romantic relationship. The book has lots of sex, but no love story as such.
• More work being shown about things like modelling and acting. I learned things!

Books I like: Discworld. (This will be more about the later books than the series as a whole.)

• I may be in a minority here, but I find the direction later books has taken pretty dull. Ankh-Morpork has gone from a bustling kaleidoscope of every city in existence or fantasy to basically Victorian London with some modern stuff. The books still count as fantasy, in that the plots wouldn't work without the supernatural element (for example, The Truth, one of the least fantasy-heavy books, still had the plot depending on the existence of werewolves and the lizards emitting "dark light"), but the magic and wonder seems to have gone out of them. Characters even have Blackberries. Oddly enough, I think the older books did a better job actually integrating modern elements in the world (for example, pizza being invented by a religion that thought the gods intended the Discworld to be one, and so we get pizza-related holy wars), while the new ones just seem to... throw it in.
• Closely tied to the previous point: too many books about Ankh-Morpork and Vimes. I like Ankh-Morpork, but not enough to justify the exclusion of pretty much every other setting. It's simply become over-exposed; same goes for its characters.
• Pratchett can be a bit preachy; not all the time, but some books get it quite heavily. I agree with the morality, but that's exactly it: they're very safe, Captain Obvious Aesops about things like "racism is bad". This put me off Thud and Snuff in particular. (I thought Jingo made a much better point about racism and conflict without labouring it.)

edited 28th Mar '12 2:00:06 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

^I agree with your first point about Discworld. I think it's part of the reason why I like the Tiffany Aching books more than the recent Ankh-Morpork ones. What I'd really like to read is another stand-alone, like Pyramids or Small Gods. Pterry's acknowledged this problem of "over-crowding" and characters overtaking the books, though, so it doesn't seem likely.

I like Rincewind, but I can't imagine we'll ever have another silly Rincewind adventure in the current Discworld.

I know, Small Gods and Pyramids are some of my favourite books in the series.

Personally Rincewind bored me, but this is why these things are subjective!

Heheh...racist lingerie...

Get your racist lingerie kits today! Buy them in the next twenty minutes and we'll throw in a free blackface kit!

^^^He certainly didn't have much depth, but I feel oddly attached to him.

I was attached to Rincewind too. And unfortunately, I'd say that those anvils needed to be dropped.

Books I dislike: The Hunger Games

• Haymitch is a very believable character.
• You can feel the horror of the Games.
• The Capitol is shown having good if misguided people.
• Katniss is definitely not perfect nor is she shown to be.

Books I like: Discworld

• Vimes ends up in the right far too often (like the aforementioned situation with de Worde)
• Vetinari, while awesome, is dominating the later books
• Some characters have just apparently dropped off the Disc

...That was supposed to be read as "racy-est."

Yeah, I know. Raciest. XD

I agree about Vetinari. I love the guy, but his many moments of awesome (and I use that expression unironically) stopped being awesome once I got the feeling that Pratchett is putting in scenes with him doing increasingly awesome things just because the fans love it. To me, Vetinari's sheer style peaked in Going Postal when he arrests Gilt and, when Gilt calls him on this being unconstitutional, reminds Gilt that he's a tyrant.

I also liked it more back when he was more of a competent Evil Overlord who subverted the character type by not being very evil (still ruthless, though). There was a certain creepiness to the reader not being quite certain whether he was supposed to be seen as a bad guy or not. Remember, one of his earliest appearances (in Guards! Guards!) had him rather obliquely threatening to kill the wives and children of the Guild leaders. In the recent books, Vetinari's characterisation as The Most Concentrated Awesome Badass In Existence gives him no moral ambiguity to speak of.

edited 10th May '12 4:06:18 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

@Doktorvon Eurotrash

Yeah, that's how I feel about later Discworld too. It's gone from being subversive to being formulaic, from fantastic to mundane.

A Song of Fire and Ice -Fatigue is starting to set in. There's only so many punches to the gut I can take before I start wanting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I decided there wasn't a worthwhile light at the end of the tunnel when I got far enough into Dance to refresh myself on the point of the subplot with Aemon and the wildling prince - said point reading to me as "one of the two characters who can actually improve this hellhole of a world world will be incinerated by the end of this book." Still don't know how it actually came out, and pretty happy that way.

Liked: Hamlet (read in an excellent Russian translation, there's no way I can tackle that amount of Old English, since English is my second language, not my first)

1. I always thought that Polonius' death came off as a Diabolus ex Machina. It's just too contrived.

2. The slow pacing was a bit too slow for me at points. Granted, maybe it's just my ADHD kicking in.

Hated: War and Peace (read in its original Russian, couldn't get through the entire book, broke down after reading about 2/3rds of it)

1. EPIC PHONETICS OF EPIC PROSE. No, seriously, Tolstoy knows how to make his words sound. There's simply no reason to read the English translations if you know Russian.

2. Dolohov (until right before the duel, where the character writing goes to crap) is AWESOME. Simply my favorite character in the book. (I hated all the others, though. Most of the time everyone is just boring)

3. The subplot about the food and the way Denisov steals it from soldiers on his own side who haven't eaten for two days to feed his soldiers who haven't eaten properly for two weeks is so goddamn epic that I seriously wish it was in a better book.

edited 8th Apr '12 12:45:55 AM by Muzozavr

I'll let you slide because it's not your first language, but Shakespeare is actually Modern English. A bit archaic, yes, but it's still the same language as we speak today. Old English is... completely different. If Annebeeche hadn't been banned I'd tell you to ask her to show you the difference, but it basically boils down to this: Old English was spoken from the Germanic invasion of Britain (c. 550) to the Norman Conquest (1066), at which point it turned into Middle English, which in turn became Modern English after the Renaissance. The three are very different languages, just as Old Ruthenian and Old Church Slavonic are both quite different from Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian.

So, yeah, knowing is half the yadda yadda yadda.

edited 9th Apr '12 1:02:41 AM by JHM

Early Modern English, to avoid confusion with the latest controversial additions to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The "a bit archaic" is enough to make it pretty much indecipherable for me. Anyway, thanks for telling me the difference.

I you can ever manage it, I'd recommend finishing War and Peace eventually. As the man said, "no one ever wished it longer"—but the book gathers power as it goes along, and shows us things about its characters that no other book has done as well. This sounds strange, but without revealing any spoilers, I'd say that the future course of Prince Andrei's story ends up teaching us important, crucial things about being human that we didn't know before.

Because it's not pedantic enough around here yet: some scholars simply divide the English language into Anglo-Saxon (pre-Conquest) and English (post-Conquest). That's probably because the transition from Middle & Modern English is VERY hard to define, and because Middle English is still mostly intelligible to a patient, well-read modern speaker.

The difference between the Old English of Beowulf and Modern English is roughly comparable to that between the oldest Church Slavonic manuscripts and modern Bulgarian.

As for War and Peace, I've actually seen the 6+ hour version of the Soviet movie, so I actually do know most of the plot. The movie's not bad, but the book... eeehhhh. Without going into massive walls-of-text, to me personally it feels like the Uncanny Valley of a great book. And Tolstoy himself constantly feels like the Uncanny Valley of a great writer.

As in, "just good enough to frustrate you that he isn't just that much better"? I think I've had that happen before. It's rare, but it happens.

I know well that feeling. "This is pretty good, but it pains me that it just isn't that little bit better!" I've had it about a number of things, really, but I do know it with regards to books.

Actually no, not a "why isn't he just a bit better", though there is a bit of that, too. The characters are almost ready to come alive, but never do.

My perception of War And Peace in comparison to a great book is the same as the general perception of a zombie in comparison to a human. It has some horribly warped moments that actually made me question Tolstoy's moral sensibilities, especially in the beginning, where one particularly carelessly constructed phrase cannot belong to any character, only to the author's voice — and either there is some serious Moral Dissonance here at work, or there is something bad beneath the carefully constructed facade.

I probably would've hated it less, if the facade wasn't this well done — I feel there's something wrong behind it, but I can't see what exactly. That bugs me to no end.

This is all just my opinion, though. If you disagree, feel free to ignore. I'm not trying to make a serious argument here, this is just how I feel.

Like: The Wheel Of Time

My favorite series ever, but the author has a tendency to over describe minute details and every day actions, which will good occasionally started to bog down over time and put a strain on plot-relevant activities. I get that it was meant to be realstic, but it ended up being a drag.

Dislike: Eragon

The characters are...likeable.