Finally through the boring fire that is book three of The Dark Tower by Stephen King we leave Wizard and Glass behind to return to the main story of the series with the Wolves of the Calla and The Song of Susannah. Though not the best in the series the Wolves of the Calla is definitely the best of the later books in the series while The Song of Susannah leaves you wondering whether it is wholly necessary or wishing there was more.
What to Read While Waiting for The Winds of Winter.
Supposedly, George R.R. Martin has finally finished the sixth installment of A Song of Ice and Fire titled The Winds of Winter, according to one of the directors from Game of Thrones. Until it comes from the source this is enitrely speculation. Luckily, there are a lot of books out there for you to read while you wait. Fantasy has not sat back waiting around while Martin works on the book in MSDos, continuing to publish books on par with his ambitious series.
Some of these recommendations are simlar to A Song of Ice and Fire, some only share the same Fantas genre, and lastly is a list of those recommended by others but whose qulaity can be corroborated. By the time you finish this list, maybe the real release date will be announced. Maybe even the book will be released by the time you’re done.
The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
The Blade Itself
Before They Are Hanged.
The Last Argument of Kings.
First Law World by Joe Abercrombie
Best Served Cold
The Heroes
Red Country*
Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss
The Name of the Wind
The Wise Man’s Fear
The Slow Regard of Silents Things (An in between novel.)
Gentleman Bastard Sequence by Scott Lynch
The Lies of Locke Lamora
Red Seas Under Red Skies
The Republic of Thieves
The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb
Assassin’s Apprentice
Royal Assassin*
Assassin’s Quest*
Crescent Moon Kingdoms by Saladin Ahmed
The Throne of the Crescent Moon
Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
Sandman Slim
Kill the Dead
Aloha from Hell
Devil Said Bang*
Kill City Blues*
The Getaway Gods*
Novels by Neil Gaiman
Good Omens (written with Terry Pratchett
Neverwhere
Stardust
American Gods
Anansi Boys
The Graveyard Book
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Books by China Miéville (There are others but I can’t recommend them.)
The City & The City
Kraken
Embassytown
The Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisen
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
The Broken Kingdoms
The Kingdom of Gods
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson (Though I did not like books two and three.)
The Final Empire
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages
Shattered Sea by Joe Abercrombie
Half A King
Half the World
Half A War
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium
The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings
The Silmarillion
The Dark Tower by Stepehen King
The Gunslinger
The Drawing of the Three
The Waste Lands
Wizard and Glass (The worst in the series.)
The Wolves of the Calla
The Song of Sussanah
The Dark Tower
Other Books
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
The City Stained Red by Sam Sykes
Books Recommended by Others / Series I Haven’t Read Yet
The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
The Way of Kings
Words of Radiance
The Tawny Man Trilogy by Robin Hobb
Fool’s Errand
The Golden Fool
Fool Fate
The Fitz and the Fool Trilogy
Fool’s Assassin
Fool’s Quest (coming in August 2015)
Assassin’s Fate (forthcoming 2016)
Other Books
A Crown for Cold Silver by Alex Marshall
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
*Haven’t read yet but didn’t want to cause confusion by breaking up the series.
The Connection Between Misery and Comedy in New Documentary.
In the documentary. Misery Loves Comedy, actor, comedian, creator and director Kevin Pollak asks his fellow comedians do you have to be miserable to be funny?
Appreciating A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
Most people, when talking about the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin, rank A Feast for Crows as the least interesting followed by A Dance with Dragons.
The first time through though. the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, bored me in every chapter that wasn’t a Tyrion or Davos chapter. It’s not the book’s fault but a fault of my own.
You see, I have this problem when it comes to reading. Every time I try to read a series in succession I grow bored, no, restless during the second book. It becomes hard for me to concentrate and I always end up putting the book down, especially since I’ve figured out this flaw, and picking up a different one. I think it might stem from my A.D.D. (which I was diagnosed for, not just the many people claiming to have it) but I can’t be sure.
Besides A Clash of Kings other victims of this dilemma include the second Mistborn book, The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and even The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s just when Sam and Frodo are climbing down the elven rope that I put it down though unlike the others listed I picked it back up shortly after. Spoilers ahead.
You Should Read: The City Stained Red by Sam Sykes & Rat Queens by Kurtis J. Wiebe (A double.)
This is a double You Should Read, a feature that is mostly in my drafts folder more than actually published in my blog. A lot of the time it’s because I’m not sure what I want to say about a book besides “This story blew my mind / was awesome / was cool / so good that I wish I could write like this!” and that doesn’t make much for a blog post.
Love “Game of Thrones?” Thank “unfashionable” Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who went against the grain and conquered pop culture (via Instapaper.)
“The Inklings were different. They clung by their fingernails to the past, to old languages and old books and old-school habits and values. They could be cranky geezers — beer drinkers who wore tweed, refused to admit women to their ranks and recited Anglo-Saxon poetry for fun. They expected to be ever-more marginalized and sneered at, although they did fight like hell to keep Oxford from updating its syllabus to included such new-fangled entertainments as Victorian novels. Still, they assumed that they’d lose eventually. They were so unfashionable! So how did they end up taking over popular culture?”
…
“Yet Tolkien, and to a lesser degree Lewis, arguably have a bigger foothold in the early 21st-century imagination than Carroll, Wilde or some fictional police inspector. Why should that be? Surely one of the best explanations so far has been advanced by the academic and Tolkien scholar T.A. Shippey, who believes that Tolkien drew forth the long-submerged mythic past of the Anglophone world by means of his deep, historical knowledge of the English language.”
…
“The standard sophisticated take on this fantasy is that it’s childish and escapist, that it posits a past that never existed. And that’s true — Tolkien, who regarded the modern, industrialized world as a hellscape ravened by soulless machines (he hated cars), happily copped to the escapism bit. “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?” he retorted.”
…
“Is it any wonder, then, that it isn’t the modernists, those poets of disintegration and speed and fleeting solitary experience, that readers keep returning to, but these fusty holdouts and abstainers, the guys who said, “We’d prefer not to”? Being Christian was just one of their ways of putting on the brakes, and it’s far from obligatory — let alone the central secret to their appeal. None of us gets to live in the Shire, but we haven’t lost our appetite for the kind to stories that are told there. Those stories are still the ones that feel the most like home.”
Love “Game of Thrones?” Thank “unfashionable” Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who went against the grain and conquered pop culture
May 31, 2015 at 04:08PM
via Instapaper http://ift.tt/1JgxAZo
My Introduction to Lore: The Legend of Zelda.
Recently I read this article by Phil Owen on io9 titled I Care About Star Wars Because It Introduced Me To ‘Lore.’ In it he says:
“For me and many other fans, Star Wars is not a series of movies but a setting, a place. And Star Wars was the first property I enjoyed growing up where should I want more stories in its settings I could always have them. And it wasn’t a case of, as it is in many game franchises praised for having lots of lore, characters in a book telling us about past events or info in a codex — nearly all the lore was in books or comics somewhere.”
And I thought, “yeah, Star Wars was definitely the first time I cared about the world of a property beyond its main storyline. That was until I received this in the mail:
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Graphic Novel by Shotaro Ishinomori.
This is a graphic novel, a reprint of a comic that was both printed in Nintendo Power then collected into a paperback in the 90’s. I found the paperback version shortly before The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out.
The Good, The Bad, and The Avengers: Age of Ultron
I finally saw Avengers: Age of Ultron and while it’s very good it definitely wasn’t Marvel’s best film. I’d rank it 4th or 5th in my ranking of the Marvel movies,. It was still a damn good blockbuster and being in the top five Marvel movies makes it better than most movies. Here are my thoughts on the movie.
Some Chosen Quotes on Game of Thrones Season Five. (via Instapaper)
Spoilers for the entire series and the entire book series are inbound. I’m tired of that Nathan Fillion .gif so that’s the only warning you’ll get. These are the posts I’ve read the past week about season 5 of Game of Thrones. I don’t agree with the last two articles but I thought they were worth reading.
G. Willow Wilson’s Fantastic Observation on Genre Fiction and Tropes.
“Genre–whether it’s action/adventure, romance, scifi, fantasy, or superheroes–largely differentiates itself from “mainstream literature” by its heavy reliance on tropes. The lone survivor in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The reluctant paladin called to defend his or her homeland. The white knight. The savior-sacrifice, who must pay the ultimate price to keep the darkness at bay. Good genre books and films succeed because the authors or artists have manipulated these tropes in a particularly skillful way, either by subverting them or unpacking them or, occasionally, pointing right at them. Some of the most stunning works of SF/F produced in the past couple of decades–those that have shifted the cultural conversation–have been those that rely the most heavily on tropes, on what we think we know about a certain genre, and which then proceed to show us, almost by slight-of-hand, what we have overlooked. The Walking Dead. Gravity. District 9. The superb Children of Men. What is masterful about each of these is that the creators exhibited no embarrassment whatsoever about their pulpy source material–instead, they dug deep into the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ and the ‘who’ and used tropes we might have considered all played out (the astronaut in trouble, the zombie apocalypse) to illustrate profoundly heartbreaking things about the human condition. That is, perhaps, genre in a nutshell: it is cliche turned on its head.”
Dr. Lepore’s Lament
May 14, 2015 at 03:03PM
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FourofFiveWits 