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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,105
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
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I've been wondering where to place this comment but it's my usual winge about names :) There does not seem to me to be any logic to the names - they're just ones which sound nice and are vaguely evocative. Like Zingiver for the cat which is just the…
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(Quote) We read her Ten Thousand Doors of January in the club a while ago - I picked it having thoroughly enjoyed it though I'm not sure everyone agreed with me :)
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The external conflict with the Wicked Prince was very easily handled, and tension was mostly provided by prolonging the wait for fulfilment. I think there were some other kinds of interaction - work in the library, gardening, the sundry peripheral f…
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I agree with @kcaryths - I didn't really believe in them as individuals, and certainly not in Gisele as a 40-something year old individual. I guess the only real question for me was "when will they finally get on with it?" but I accept tha…
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A kind of post-scarcity world, you mean? That's an interesting thought. There's also no over-population and the only ecological damage is done by "nasty people" - even the years of neglect of Malediction's garden appears to be rapidly corr…
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I enjoyed it more than I was expecting to :) and indeed I thought the first third was pretty good... but then it faded (for me as a reader) and kind of lost the plot for the sake of the sex. But I'm guessing that the target reader may well be more i…
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I'm thinking The Death of Grass by John Christopher (better known for the Tripods series) which I don't think we've read before and which seems to be available in multiple formats. Any thoughts?
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Looking ahead, June is down to me (so I'd better decide quickly) @BarnerCobblewood would you like to pick something for July? @clash_bowley then August
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Done now!
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About 2/3 through now but racing away so I won't be long finishing
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My pre-ordered copy of How to Find a Nameless Fae arrived electronically so I'm now tackling it!
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Discussion area set up for How to Find a Nameless Fae by AJ Lancaster, May's read which was chosen by @NeilNjae and discussion to take place on or soon after May 31st. Still time to comment on The Works of Vermin.
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I have to confess I don't remember Voice of the Whirlwind! But if it was a choice of mine I'm glad it went down well
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I kind of paused with this one while I thought about it. One of the (many) great things about the club is that we often differ amongst ourselves as to whether a particular book has this factor or not. Some books we all agree either do or don't, but …
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Yes, I just gave up on language. I know most SFF authors aren't as bothered about language roots as I like to be, but this was so much of a hotch potch that I abandoned any hope of finding consistency early on.
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As mentioned, I thought the use of scent was a great innovation. Full marks for that. If the overall setting was derivative I;m not sure what it derived from! But overall it just struck me as chaotic and haphazard, and I wasn't persuade that a socie…
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In all fairness I don't think I got far enough into it to tell! I kept thinking that I must be on the verge of some great revelation about the world, but it never seemed to come. Maybe by the end?
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Exhausting to read! Every time I sat down to read it there was this sense of "this isn't going to be a peaceful ride". Now I totally get that books need a mix of action and rest... but where was the rest? Did I believe that the characters …
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I found this very chaotic. The history of the city kept being on the verge of interesting, but then would disintegrate into confusion again - I am sure that this was a deliberate authorial ploy, a kind of mimesis if you like, but for me it was just …
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After about 1/3 of the way through I still didn't feel that I had much idea what the characters were doing. Yes, the one we started with was a kind of low-class exterminator, but then we met various aristocrats (I think this is the right word) and I…
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(Quote) This reminded me of Asimov and the inhabitants of Solaria, who had taken isolation to huge extremes to the point where actually meeting another human being in person was horrific and unthinkable as a voluntary act.
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It's available on regular Kindle (here in the UK at least) though not on bookshop.org until May 21st. That'll probably be enough time to read it. Either way I'm in
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Discussion area now set up for The Works of Vermin Still plenty of time to comment on The Doloriad by Missouri Williams @NeilNjae any thoughts for May?
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That was in the Ancient Days before my time... but you could probably make a case for Shardik also being post apocalyptic?
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(Quote) I agree that the cause of the lack of limbs is secondary, but the fact of it meant that most members of the group couldn't go very far to explore, forage, make contact with others etc. Those limitations surely were central, and the nerdy par…
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(Quote) This kind of highlights some of my perplexity about the story. We first meet Dolores being wheeled off to some other group, presumably as a bride as part of some kind of peace treaty. But then she gets dumped in the middle of nowhere, manage…
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Generally speaking sheep in theology are people in general - as in the Messiah line (itself from the prophet Isaiah) "all we like sheep have gone astray" and that then allows Agnus Dei as the identification of the son of God with the pligh…
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Interested to hear what others say about this
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Yes, the prose style was a real turn-off for me. I really didn't like the long rambling sentences strung into long rambling paragraphs. And as you say, the viewpoint shifted often in unpredictable and largely unsignalled ways. It baffled me first th…
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That's an interesting thought which hadn't occurred to me before reading your question. Not sure yet what to make of it.