What are we reading?

[airboy]

Dune starts real slow.  The Dune series also decreases in quality at a rapidly increasing rate as the sequels/prequels piled on.  Dune is more a political science/ecology in the future novel than a military science fiction book.

I've read it three times in the last 30 years.  But I read really fast, read every day, and reread stuff to go to sleep at night.

[Toonces]

^ You are not alone bruddah.  I just couldn't get into Dune. 

I got to the part where the mom(?) and kid are in a cave with some guys, and the kid starts to have this "experience" or something, and I shelved it.  Just  not what I was expecting.

But so many people like it, I feel like I should like it.  Maybe I need to try again?   :-\

Life's too short to force it. If that's the point you got to and shelved it you probably won't like the rest.

It's funny you say that because a co-worker and I were having a conversation about just that.

What started it was me talking about Morrowind.  I'm on my 5th or so start on the game and, man, I just cannot get into it.  But everyone raves about how awesome it is and how Morrowind >>Skyrim that I feel like I have to play and finish it so I can feel like I can die happy.   I don't want to die and realize I never finished Morrowind, do I?

My co-worker's opinion is that life is too short to waste time playing a game you don't like.  He compared it to Lord of the Rings.  Even though he actually is an adult that has a weekly D&D group he plays with, he's never read LotR.  He said he got to Tom Bombadill and gave up on the book.  My opinion was that he owes it to himself to read the book at least once.

Why?

Because it's a classic of the genre and was (one of) the inspiration for D&D.  It's just a classic book and everyone should read it once, but especially a D&D geek.  It gives you perspective.  That's my opinion anyway.  He has the opposite- I don't waste time on books I don't like- opinion.

So when I read your comment about Dune, that's what it made me think of.  I feel like I should read it because it's a classic book.  If I don't like it, so be it, but I should at least finish it anyway so I can feel complete.   

[Barthheart]

Heh, I have a list of classic books as long as my arm that I NEED to read before I croak... But I'll get to those when I'm retired and have more time.

For now I read the stuff that gets me interested right off and entertains me more than enlightens me.

[Martok]

So I'm now about halfway through Lord of Chaos, book 6 in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.  And while I'm still thoroughly enjoying it, I'm already starting to notice a little of the "filler" material (which is rather notorious for slowing down the pace in books 7-10, and especially WH and CoT) creep in.  Not enough to affect the pacing in the current book, but enough for me to recognize it, now that I'm aware of its existence in the series as a whole. 

Not for the first time -- and I'm sure it won't be the last -- I wonder why Jordan added all this filler material.  Was he simply trying to pad things out, so as to further line his pockets?  Or did he truly feel it was necessary to flesh out the story?  I doubt we'll ever know, of course, but I find it interesting to think about. 

Anyway, still having a blast with the novels so far.  Even setting the storyline(s) aside, they're fun to read if for no other reason than because I enjoy seeing such a well-developed fictional world. 

I always wanted to like Dune.  It's one of the classics, like the Foundation series by Asimov, or 2001 by Clarke.  Ringworld by Niven & Pournelle.  I just couldn't do it.  Not sure if it was over my head or just boring as hell.  The good thing is, I know I am in the minority here.  Too many people have read it and enjoyed, so the fault must be on my end.  Glad you are continuing to enjoy Herbert's universe, eyebiter.

I'm another reader who wasn't enthralled with Dune.  Not that I actually disliked it -- I enjoyed it well enough -- nor do I consider it a waste of time to have read it.  However, the book simply didn't grab me the way it has so many others, and I've never fully understood why it's considered such a classic of the genre.  <shrug>  Different strokes for different folks, I guess. 

[JasonPratt]

I feel reasonably sure it wasn't to line his pockets. He just split the party too much, and got lost meandering around in his descriptions, and had to invent things for certain characters to do while they were marking time. The Nyn/El plotline will really start grinding in a jerky stop/start fashion for a while in this book, and then Perrin returns and RJ has to invent things for him to do while not accomplishing much up through Book 11. And then still onward with him for a while. He really doesn't have much to do from now until the final book except (1) resolve his problems with Faile, a situation RJ invented purely to force conflict in earlier books; and (2) resolve his problems with the Whitecloaks, ditto only further back in the plot. 

I suspect Perrin was the character who was meant to be able to 'go home' and stay there for a while until needed for the Final Battle, so his story wrapped up nicely back in Book 4 and he spent Book 5 happily offscreen. I mean, sure, RJ writes him into the climax of LoC but Perrin didn't really have to be there. Any number of things could have (and actually did) set up a delaying fight long enough for Rand to break free and/or be rescued by the A-Team's first combat appearance. I have a hard time remembering anything he really affects relevant to the main plot up until the final book. He neutralizes Masema, but had largely succeeded at that anyway, and he himself isn't even the one to do it: Masema gets blipped in a hilarious loose-end snip at the start of Sanderson's Book 12, and not by Perrin! Masema was really nothing more than a distant annoyance adding a little more chaos to an area already seething with it.)


Earlier this year (or was it late last year...?) I started a project which I've played with off and on, of trimming Books 6-11 down to two books. Perrin wouldn't feature a lot in them. ;) Much of the Nyn/El material would be trimmed out, too, because if the story there is that the characters are sitting around bored out of their minds, then quickly packed off to where they spend all book being ineffective and also bored out of their minds, THAT'S GOOD MATERIAL TO EDIT OUT RJ! 

I ended up trimming out quite a bit of fluff with Rand and even Matt, too (though trimming out anything with Matt hurts, but I didn't so much trim it as effectively compress two scenes better into one and skip along past some other things). Things important for the plot, and to establish their current situation and relationships with other characters, stayed. Marking time and window dressing, gone. Also all of Perrin's prologue chapter portion, gone -- he can show up later and we'd know why he came, and the girls from the 2 Rivers in Caemlyn can catch up Rand sufficiently on what's going on there meanwhile. I did keep a lot of the Forsaken material so far, because they don't get much by proportion to begin with (though I trimmed out quite a bit of that horrible Semi torture sequence, largely for taste.)

Books 6, 7 and 8 do well clustering a number of stories, just not so well in decompressing them across three books.

Story 1.) Rand tries to rule like a king and fails miserably. This leads him into dealing with saidin (which is driving him and the BT crazy) and hiding out so he doesn't mess things up worse in the Second Macro Book which comprises 9,10,11.

1.1.) Rand vs. Sammael, which is largely based on marking time in order to bluff Sam about Rand and Mat's real plan. The bluff delay does give the White Tower an opportunity to try being an antagonist, and they do a good job even though (like a lot of RJ's 'plots' in these middle books) they basically pull it off at the last minute. But it's Elaida's last chance to be competently dangerous for, like, ever, so I'm okay with it. This is finished by the end of Book 7.

1.2.) Rand establishes the Black Tower and Mazrim Taim.
1.2.1.) Phase One: from humble beginnings the BT levels up to be a scary elite fighting force. Basically accomplished by the end of book 6, which is amazingly quick by RJ's standards.  8)
1.2.2.) Phase Two: Taim, just how much of a problem is he? On the backburner mostly through book 7 and clarified (for the reader at least) at the end of 8.

1.3.) Rand vs. the Return of the Seanchan. Mostly setup in Books 6 and 7, kicks into gear with Book 8. Round one goes to Rand, but from his side it looks like a pyhric victory and reveals he has to get away from kingship. (Also, I can't spell pyrhic apparently.  :P ) After this the Seanchan stop trying to advance in the south at least, so he accomplished that much.


Story 2.) The Supergirls.

2.1.) Egwene finishes her Wise One training (or close enough to never mind) and puts that to work consolidating power at the White Tower and kicking them into gear. She'll be parked in one place (or two places rather) for Books 9-11 accomplishing not much and I'd leave out a lot of that, but I'd keep most of her things in Books 6-8.

2.2.) Min finally gets back to Rand and becomes his consort/prophecy aid. Not much happens with that, and even RJ doesn't bother much with it.  :))

2.3.) El and Nyn (and Avi once she gets in range) discover the existence of the Bowl of the Winds (plus the big cache of *-angreal and the secret retired superchannelers), hunt for it, find it, deploy it, and escape. This gets horribly decompressed in stuttery jumps of them not accomplishing a lot but because Mat is around and they're the only other female protagonists RJ spends A BUTTLOAD OF TIME detailing their boredom and failures and occasional successes. Women are constantly bitchy to one another and to the men around them along the way, because women, amirite? {puke}

2.4.) Mat acts as plot support for various purposes until rocks fall on him. But because he's actually amusing I'd keep as much of his material wherever possible.  O0


3.) Who will lead the Forses now? (Doesn't quite count as a Story.)

3.1.) Sam makes a strong bid to break off and do his own thing, but falls prey to sitting around waiting to trap Rand. Done by Book 7. I'd make his death more obviously obvious, too.

3.2.) Moridin arrives meanwhile (though not obviously so in Book 6 of course) and consolidates enough of the surviving Forses to make it clear he's in charge henceforth. The Forses don't really do much otherwise, which is a problem, but an endemic one throughout the series and I can't change that by editing. (Relatedly, I can't change the lamely anticlimactic usage of SHADAR HARAN SUPERFADE eventually, which leaves me honestly unsure how much of him to leave around. Oh, uh, spoiler, Martok in case you were hoping SH's buildup would amount to anything special. Sorry. I won't go into details, but just get used to disappointment now.)


These are all pretty much a bloc for the three books; the subsequent three books map out almost as cleanly except with less for the characters to do.  In effect Knife of Dreams should have been one larger book but not grossly much larger.

[Martok]

Yeah, the Supergirls plotlines drove me a bit crazy, especially El & Nyn's.  However, I also agree it was helped that at least Mat was there to lighten things up a bit. 

What *really* drove me insane in books 7-10 was Perrin's storyline; that damn thing meandered worse than the lower Mississippi during spring flooding.  I can't believe it took RJ until KoD to resolve that one.   

[JasonPratt]

Just the amount of work you are all putting into getting published and the unequal results received...depressing for me, especially as an aspiring author.

But just think, if you score the bigtime someday and get picked up by TOR, they may send a film crew to follow you around during one of your book tours.

That's their little featurette on Marie (and MRK whom she teamed up with for a book store signing) and her new 19th centuryish dragon-hunting book (2nd in a contracted 5 part series.)

Insanely, the frame chosen by TOR and/or by Youtube as indicative of the video, shows neither Marie nor Mary, just someone in the audience. Is she supposed to be another author whom viewers would recognize more readily? No idea. The Maryies are cosplaying Victorian though.  :)

I had forgotten how super-weird Marie's accent is. (Texan + Bostonian + Indianian + whatever she's picking up in San Francisco.)

[Gusington]

Following me around wouldn't be very interesting...'schleps up to study, plays computer games, reads book, pets dog, goes to bed.'

[Gusington]

I begin Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles today, unless I can dig out the first part of that Hitler biography I bought by Ian Kershaw to read along with playing the new Wolfenstein game.

[BanzaiCat]

Finally finished Tales From Development Hell (admittedly, I skipped several chapters that talked about movies that I had no interest in reading about).

Now on to a book I've had on my Kindle for a while now, Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen.

[MetalDog]

B_C, both those books sound good.  I'm just curious, what movies did the book cover that you weren't interested in?

[BanzaiCat]

B_C, both those books sound good.  I'm just curious, what movies did the book cover that you weren't interested in?

I can give you a breakdown of the contents so you can see if it's something you're interested in.

1. Smoke and Mirrors - a pretty epic-sounding movie that was never made; it had to do with magic and Indiana Jones-ish adventure.

2. Monkey Business - how Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes movie bizarrely developed.

3. Cast Into Mount Doom - about the road to making the eventual Lord of the Rings trilogy.

4. We Can Rewrite It For You Wholesale - about the development of Total Recall and its sequel (this chapter hurts because the sequel sounded all kinds of awesome). An interesting note: Minority Report was an offshoot of the planned Total Recall sequel.

5. Keeping Up With The Joneses - the tale of the development of the fourth Indiana Jones movie.

6. The Lost Crusade - about Schwarzenegger's pet project, Crusade, which was never made.

7. Train Wreck - a movie (which sounded rather interesting) called Isobar, which was touted as 'Alien on a train,' but was never made despite the best efforts of Ridley Scott, Joel Silver, Sylvester Stallone, and Roland Emmerich.

8. Who Wants To Be A Billionaire? - about the development of The Aviator. I liked the movie but it isn't something I'd go back and see again. This chapter was a little dull for me and I skipped the latter half of it.

9. Perchance to Dream - about the development of a comic book character, The Sandman, for a movie. I never heard of this character and read part of the chapter, but since I didn't know anything about it, it didn't resonate with me, so I skipped much of it.

10. Crisis On The Hot Zone - how a cerebral film dealing with a potentially world-ending virus ended up getting Hollywood-ized and therefore turned to crap, and ended up never being made since the terrible film Outbreak was being made by a rival studio at the same time (plus other reasons as well).

11. Fall and Rise of the Dark Knight - a very interesting chapter about the development of the Batman reboot.

12. Tomb Raider Chronicles - the difficulties faced in bringing Lara Croft and her boobs to the big screen.

13. The Incredible Shrinking Film - about the never-made remake of Fantastic Voyage, which at one point had James Cameron behind it.

14. Tales From The Script - about the author's experience as a scriptwriter - very interesting.

I made it sound as if I skipped half the book - for me, even skipping one chapter is a Bad Thing, and I skipped most of two. However, the remainder of the book was very interesting. If you like behind-the-scenes tales, check it out:

http://www.amazon.com/Tales-From-Development-Hell-Greatest/dp/0857687239

The same author wrote The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. I haven't read this one but it's on my short list to get in the near future:

http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Sci-fi-Revised-Expanded-Edition/dp/1845767551

And if you want a really funny and interesting look at how assistants move and operate within the Hollywood environment, I highly recommend Where's My F*cking Latte?:

http://www.amazon.com/Wheres-cking-Stories-Assistant-Hollywood-ebook/dp/B000ZHN93S/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1401632288&sr=1-1&keywords=where%27s+my+latte

[MetalDog]

Thanks for the breakdown, B_C.  I love movies and while I am not really all that interested in how they are made or get made, I, like I suspect many others here, LOVE knowledge.  Of secret things, hidden treasures, stories that don't get told.  What makes me TRULY sad, and you touched on it briefly, is the Hollywood-ization of stories that don't need the Hollywood treatment to begin with.  I have always wondered what possessed bright, intelligent, creative people (as I expect many Hollywood types to be) to consider it necessary to fool with someone elses creation.  LotR is a perfect example.  Arwens invented role in the movie.  Scenes, such as Frodo sending Sam back to the Shire at the foot of Cirith Ungol or Faramir bringing the hobbits to Osgiliath, that never happened in the books and added absolutely NOTHING that the original didn't already cover far better.

[BanzaiCat]

That chapter on LOTR actually deals more with a planned live-action film back in the 70s sometime. I was disappointed that it didn't talk more about the animated film (which it did hint at..."when there's a whip (wa-PSSHHH)...there's a way..." - or what you see on Mirth's welcome mat), and it didn't get too in-depth with Peter Jackson's trilogy; it was kind of all over the place. But still, most everything I read in that book was pretty fascinating.

[JasonPratt]

Ahem... there were two animated adaptations of LotR.  8) Bakshi had the rights through The Two Towers and covered things up through the battle at Helms' Deep; Rankin-Bass pretty much skipped the rest of TTT and dealt with Return.

(I did get a Kindle copy of Development Hell, btw.)