"Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain."
--Proverbs 127:1(a)
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it"
--Alan Kay
An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman are sitting in a bar. Suddenly, a fly dives into each of their beers. The Irishman says, "Barman, a fly just dove into my beer. Bring me another one." The Irishman got another beer. The Englishman says, "Ah, whatever," and empties his pint, fly and all. The Scotsman pulls the fly out of his beer, shakes it up and down, and screams, "Spit it out, blast you! Spit it out!"
I start reading a lot of books, but finish only a fraction of them. Why? Because many of the Sci-fi/ Fantasy books written these days are ether trash, or unworthy of my time. By trash I mean full of depraved filth, and by unworthy I mean of exiguous quality.
I thought I'd start a list of books I didn't read due to one of the above reasons. Or rather, that I started but did not finish. Then I got to thinking, why have a list of books that aren't worth the reading, but not a list of books that are worth reading? So that section has been added.
I have also included books and authors to avoid (or to read) from other people whose judgement I trust.
Avoid These |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| Author | Title | Series | Reasons not to read |
| Eric Flint & Ryk E. Spoor | "Boundary" | PP | |
| James Patrick Hogan | "The Legend that was Earth" | PP | |
| David Louis Edelman | "Infoquake" | PP | |
| Herbie Brennan | "Faerie Wars" | "The Faerie Wars Chronicles" | DF, PP |
| "Free Fall" | TRE | ||
| Linda Wichman | "The Legend of the Emerald Rose" | TRE | |
| Elisabeth Moon | "Ink and Steel" | DF | |
| Karen Miller | "The Innocent Mage" | PP | |
| Mike Resnick | "Starship: Mutiny" | The "Starship" Series | PP |
| Laura Anne Gilman | "Burning Bridges" | A "Retrivers" Novel. | P, EQ |
| Dennis L. McKiernan | "Tales of Mithgar" | A "Mithgar" Novel. | EQ It was horrible, bad writing! It was redundant and repeated itself a lot! Nay! It repeated itself quite a bit, like a Wee Un! If you couldn't stand that last paragraph, you don't want to read this book. I was only able to stand about ten pages of it, and only that much because the only other option was really bad TV. Plus there was something called a "Vulfcwmb." No kidding, that's an actual word from the book, some town or village. |
| Kathleen Ann Goonan | "In War Times" |
TE I didn't even get past the first page of this book. |
|
DF: Depraved Filth.
P, PP: Profanity, Profuse Profanity.
TR / TE: Too 'Romantic' / Explicit.
EQ: Exiguous(Poor) Quality.
Hunt These Down and Read Them |
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|---|---|---|---|
| Author | Title | Series | Reasons to read |
| Walter Moers | "The City of Dreaming Books" | N.A. | Interesting writing style. Masterful use of foreshadowing. Illustrations. |
| Brandon Sanderson | "Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones" | Alcatraz | Although it is a "child's book", it is still laugh out loud funny. |
| Brandon Sanderson | "Warbreaker" | NA |
Seeings as it's by Brandon Sanderson, there is of course a unique and interesting magic system. It's a great read.
If I had never read Mistborn, I would have nothing to complain about in this book. However, The premise of Warbreaker is: There is an evil "god king" who the main character (Vivenna), a young inexperianced girl, tries to overthrough by hiring a small band of experts. It turns out in the end that the "god king" is actually not a bad guy after all. I could have used that same description for Warbreaker or Mistborn. The stories were not the same, but having that underlaying simerlarity just nagged at me for most of the book. |
| Philip K. Dick | "Vulcan's Hammer" | A short book of less than 200 pages, it's a quick read, and worth the time. | |
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Last modified: 10/08/09
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