Right there with you 
I’m in a book club, and they all love sad books (the big one a while ago was A Little Life). Everyone read it and then cried for two days, and somehow that was good?
I’d like escapism! Inspiration! Hopepunk! I want to look at a book on my shelf and think “Awww, yeah, that was wonderful, I’m keeping that” instead of it representing pointless trauma stories.
But I do get the attraction of “exquisitely sad” stories when they’re well-written too.
Currently reading through Leviathan Wakes. Loving spotting all the differences from the TV show
Hello @Crichton5 … it’s been a while since I either saw or read any Expanse (we still haven’t started on Season 4 and I still haven’t read the latest installment). I have to say that the first book gave me some trouble with the pacing and style of writing and I only read the others after the show began. But once drawn into the series I couldn’t stop. I value great characters in books very highly and the characters of this series are quite compelling in the books and with the brilliant (I think) casting of the show made only better…
As for my own current reading, I got started on the short fiction nominees for the Hugo the other day.
I didn’t read a lot of new things for the last 12 months–mostly I’ve been re-reading old favorites–I had not actually read anything before last week (two aborted attempts at a novel and a novella). So far my favorite as been “As the last I may know” from the short stories nominees. It had good pacing, a pair of interesting characters and a good dilemma all within the confines of short fiction.
And I keep getting distracted by a re-read of some vampire romance novels… which feel quite dated–not only does the author mention songs the characters listen to but also there are some character tropes that were apparently okay in the early 2000s that I find are a bit hard to stomach right now. Nevertheless the romance parts are good which is why I am rereading the series for the third time.
I just finished reading the last three Emberverse volumes. I found them uneven, but I thought the final chapters did a good job of bringing forward elements from earlier books (including elements I didn’t like when I encountered them!) and bringing the series to a proper conclusion.
Now I’m back to David Friedman . . .
So, remembering that I have a major essay due tomorrow (which I have written none of), I tackled the entirety of Ready Player One today.
Technically, I watched the movie on Monday and read the whole book today, and after a brief pause to percolate my thoughts on the work, I will dive into the writing. It’s only 1,750 words, which means I am going to very rapidly run out of words to use.
The book was… bad. I mean, written fine, I suppose, but full of a whole host of enormous problems and several frustrating Deus Ex moments (a consistent pet-peeve of mine in writing). Since my essay is going to have to focus on the differences between the two versions and not the consistent problems with both, I won’t get to rant to my professor about the most problematic elements of the work, which is a pity, really.
That stated, it was fine. It wasn’t as sexist as I was expecting (which isn’t to say it isn’t sexist: it absolutely is), but it made up for that by being significantly more transphobic and racist than I was expecting. So it all kinda balanced out at a book that I digested quickly and had a few chuckles with, but overall wonder why it received such acclaim (and why on earth it deserved a Big Motion Adaptation when much, much, much better works of sci-fi haven’t).
Anyway. I have 2 more short stories to read for the course (Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Evil Robot Monkey”, I believe, and Andy Weir’s “Lacero”, which I can only hope does something to redeem how much I hate Weir for The Martian as both a book and a movie)
its amazing how often I hear this about this book. I’ve never read it, but it keeps showing up on like “BEST BOOKS OF NOSTALGIA AND NERD THINGS” and then anyone who actually talks about it talks about how bad it is haha. I’ve seen a few breakdowns of its problems that definitely won’t be putting it on my list anytime soon haha.
It was nominated for the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award, and I was (and am) on the Best Novel jury, so I read it. I was unhappy when it was one of the five finalists, and even more when it won; I had ranked it below No Award/None of the Above.
I disliked a lot of things about it, but the central one was that it was a huge wish fulfillment fantasy: A story about a person with no actually valuable abilities winning not merely a lot of money, but a nearly inconceivable amount of money, for what amounts to a vast trivia contest. More specifically, I thought while I was reading it of Ayn Rand’s writing about the desire for the unearned as the ultimate source of conflict in society (whether it’s for unearned wealth or for unearned praise), and I thought that the whole novel was about the eager quest for the unearned—for wealth gained not by producing something of value, but by gratifying an arbitrary whim, and for praise gained by succeeding in doing so. And that seemed totally at odds with the political beliefs we were supposed to be promoting.
(In contrast, I was happy that Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, which I had nominated, tied for Best Novel, though the award’s value seemed lessened by being shared with something as dismal as Ready Player One.)
@Marx Please don’t answer this if for any reason you don’t want to, but I’m really interested in why you would hate The Martian?
Oh, I don’t mind answering!
I have an issue with authors that like to show off how smart they are. Weir is particularly insufferable for this, his author-analog (I really hate the term “Mary Sue” considering how sexist it is) being particularly awful. And the NASA scientist that recalculates the Martian-Earth transit slingshot is just so smart that everyone doesn’t understand how smart he is blah blah blah.
Look, I get putting science in your science fiction. And it can be done even with smug, vaguely superior characters (Scalzi does it masterfully in “Old Man’s War”). But there comes a line when a writer decides that they don’t just want science in their story: they want to beat you over the head with how smart they are. Asimov does that a bunch, Niven does it occasionally, and Weir does it for the entire story. It really grates. I hates it.
I think it’s the direct dialogue the protagonist has with “the reader” (I think he’s narrating to his journal in the novel/movie) where he specifically calls out “Hey, look! I’m smarter than all of you!” all the gosh-darn time that I hate the most.
I don’t mind at all when authors show off how smart they are, but it depends how they do it. Some authors seem to have a writing style that cannot help but give the impression they are smart, or at least well-read.
For example, I remember reading a long time ago, back when I read the comic strip, one of the Penny Arcade guys being sneeringly dismissive of China Mieville for the crime of, as far as I could tell, using his vocabulary. That criticism struck me as petty and silly.
Anyway, It usually does bug me when one of the characters in a story is made to appear smart in the way you just described. The “character who is so smart the other characters can’t keep up” is a very hard thing to write well, or at least in a way that isn’t irritating.
It’s so, so bad. And I’m the target audience: a white male nerd of precisely the right age to get the references, to the point that I could figure out the author is probably exactly 1-2 years older than me.
It’s a list (sometimes an actual LIST) of games and movies, but behind that there’s a “nerd gets the girl by virtue of being the biggest nerd” fantasy which… goes nowhere. At the end the hero doesn’t aim to improve his terrible society at all, just get rich and win. It’s appallingly written, and exists only to provoke occasional “Aww, I had transformers figures in 1986 too!” moments, and that’s it.
It’s baaaaaad.
I didn’t notice many of the problems with it at the time, but when I read Armada (which is the same core idea, only with even less reason behind it) I spotted in retrospect how much of it just didn’t hold together.
I think it was Charlie Stross’ Accelerando that made me stop and think “…this guy is much smarter than I am” but I LOVED it.
Not patronising, not getting back at the bullies or insinuating that he’s too clever for you to understand, just throwing really intelligent new ideas at you again and again.
Yeah, I read RP1 and didn’t hate it the first time, but then read it again for a (90% women) book club, and when you’re taking notice of the writing in order to discuss it later you quickly realise how inadequate the whole book is.
I gave up on The Martian at the hydrazine scene. My suspension of disbelief cracked completely there; disaster seemed inevitable and the reasons for it not happening unbelievable.
I found the style very wearing and that probably distracted me from errors in the rivets, because I enjoyed the technical part. Also the psychological angle of the mission commander who made the decision to abandon seemed as though it were working up to be something interesting, and was then dropped.
I’m going to stick up for Ready Player One again. And The Martian. They are both fun, and funny - in both book and film formats. But my wife wouldn’t go near Ready Player One, for good reasons - she’d hate it. She watched the first minute or two of the film before knowing enough. I don’t think that makes it terrible, or her wrong. The target audience excludes her completely.
I struggle to imagine why either would be chosen for a book club, unless it’s a book club of people who want to reminisce about playing Joust/Kerbal Space Program. I also find it amazing that Ready Player One was ever considered for an award by a politically minded literature organisation [See http://lfs.org/blog/abuse-of-power-violence-liberty-gaming-and-virtual-reality-an-appreciation-of-ernest-clines-ready-player-one-the-2012-prometheus-award-winner-for-best-novel/ for some amazing analysis]
There are lots of people who think JK Rowling’s books are awful, but they are in the same category as far as I’m concerned. They set out to entertaining/popular, and achieve that. None of these authors is the next George Eliot.
[Aside, I seem to be the yin to @Marx’s yang. I would recommend all of Ready Player One, The Martian and Never Let Me Go. Not to everyone, though]
Neal Stephenson is this for me. I’m always afraid to recommend him because I enjoy the digressions in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle a lot while still thinking they can be a bit much.
Yeah, I still can’t decide if the WHOLE of Anathem is just showing off, but I did enjoy it.
Thanks. I totally respect this opinion and find it well explained and justified.
Personally I found ready player one to be reminiscent of when I read prachett as a child. An introduction to more heavy and interesting themes presented in a veneer of humour/culture. Enjoyable but trash.
I actually loved the martian. But i’m A mechanical engineer. So highly biased. The chapter where he followed the quality defect was from my perspective over simplified but entertaining, and again, personally, i’d Never seen the mundanity of my job and the severity of it’s implications portrayed in a book before ( I know it’s more QC but it’s something I deal with on the regular). That’s not to say it’s without massive flaws but many things I enjoy are flawed.
Loving this book chat FYI.