Because Tom Lloyd kind of asked.

[the_alleycat]

So, I mentioned that I'd been disappointed by a bunch of 'new' books i'd read over the last couple of years and was asked which ones

Comments

[yourapocalypse]

I'm reading 'The Left Hand of God' at the moment, and I'm nearing the end. It's a good story, but it's not well written at all. It falls into the lazy fantasy convention of needlessly renaming common items, and the characterisation is piss poor to boot. It's reading like a GCSE English Literature student with decent ideas, but without the voice for them.

[the_alleycat]

Yeah, I know what you mean but I did find the story compelling and as I said different enough that I want to see where it goes.

The renaming thing, yes. Also leads to some weirdness where he seems to use real world names and then fantasy names at different points. I'm not sure yet whether this is deliberateand due to be explained in any sequel.

Plus his take on agincourt was weirdly out of place and didn't feel true to the setting in any way shape or form.

[tomlloyd]

Interesting. I shan't comment much though because lots here are people I have met/likely to meet and frankly beyond stating my opinion on the books, it's pretty inelegant to get into a detailed discussion about failings in them. Especially when many of them sell more books than me.

Am amused to see that your comment about Brian Ruckley's book was, I'm sure, very similar to several I saw a few years back, but with the books reversed. Also curious to see that the books that didn't grab you are often ones I've not picked up precisely because I'm fairly sure I'd have just that reaction. Don't know if that's me unfairly judging, or a certain level of experience in the way publishers do covers and blurbs that tells me whether the books are for me.

[the_alleycat]

With the books reversed, are you referring to your own or do you mean within that group

[tomlloyd]

I mean people comparing mine to Winterbirth, as I think they were both epic debuts coming out close to each other, and your reaction to Winterbirth was how they'd seen mine in comparison.

Well yes, I'm comfortable in saying the Twilight books suck, or i'm confident that i would be had i actually read them. Not a fan of religious preaching anyway, or any such agenda in books.

[tripletakeover]

maybe this will be the spur to the arse that snowballs

Interesting mental imagery.

[the_alleycat]

Sentence may have neede more punctuation, the spur to the arse being a seperate idea to the snowballing of me actually doing something ;p

But then I have a creeping suspiscon that snowballing may mean more than I think it does since this is you commenting ;p

[tripletakeover]

Oh. It does...

[the_alleycat]

Yeah, I checked out Graceling before Fire but had forgotten about it :/

I'm a huge fan of Richard Morgan [he did a bunch of great SciFi/Cyberpunk style books so I bought Steel Remains as soon as it came out.

Mistborn Stuff was cool, love his internal consistancy and level of detail, I think I had a few issue with the way they were written but i've not sat down an thought hard about it so not sure exactly what. Did buy the trilogy and his one-off Elantris so I must have liked something.

I'll check out the other two when I'm next adding to my amazon list.

And I heard Steven Erikson more than you... I bought the shiny hardback omnibus of short stories from PS Publishing even ;p