Just finished “When We Were Orphans” by Ishiguro of “Remains of the Day” fame. Boy, can he write. Beautiful prose. Except…
This English boy’s parents are kidnapped in China in the early 20th century. He is sent back to England. Grows up. Becomes an investigator. Returns to China to solve his parents kidnapping in the mid 1930s when the Japanese are invading China - and everyone assumes his parents are still being held alive.
Huh?
Oh, burundi, and that’s one of my favorite books! You and I were one on Cold Mountain; I’m dejected you’re not with me on Ahab’s Wife! 
What a juicy story! I wish you’d give it another try!
~Ellen, who begs
Rick Riordan’s first Tres Navarre mystery, Big Red Tequila. Riordan’s from San Antonio, so you’d think he’d know that the family of King Ranch fame is spelled Kleberg (not Klayburgh), the former governor of Texas does not spell her name with an e, and the town (and street) is spelled Nacogdoches.
Fortunately, he got a better copy editor for his subsequent books.
Robin
Some more comments about Arthur C Clarke.
What bothered me most about 3001 was that David Bowman was just a computer program. I really loved the idea of the Star-Child in 2001. Bowman had entered the next step in evolution, had left the material world and lived on as pure energy.
"Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.
Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea."
In 3001 ACC just discards this beautiful idea and says Bowman was just a program stored in the monolth, which by the way was just a very stupid computer.
When I looked for the cite in 2001 I stumbled upon something even worse! In the foreword, the Milky Way is described as “our local universe”!!! I’m glad I missed that one the first time I read that book, or I couldn’t have read on.
Clarke says that 3001 and the other Books in the series aren’t really sequels of 2001. But he did stuff like that in his other works, too.
I am reading the Rama series right now. As with 2001, I loved the first book, but was really disappointed by the sequels.
In the first book, it is really important that the colonies on the other planets are extremely seperated from Earth. A person born on Mercury can never visit Earth, because of the difference in gravity. But in Rama II, after an economic crisis on Earth, all the colonies are abandoned and everybody returns to Earth. Aarrgh!!!
And there’s much more than that.
I really like the writing of Arthur C. Clarke, but why can’t he just be a bit more consistent?
I cannot read Robert Jordan anymore because of the fact that in in Interview he stated that he was not going to tie up all the loose ends in his books. I can imagine him carring on with his pointless stories, and forgetting or not bothering to let his main character resolve the conflict.
That’s one fo the other things that bugged me about 3001. All the mystery and epicness is gone, and replaced by evil aliens that can be easily stopped and annoying social commentary.
Simple. The last 3 Rama books were Co-authored by Gentry lee, who is far more interested in character development then anything else. However, his overly religious elements in his stories can be just as annoying as Clarke’s militant atheist elements in some non-co-authored stories.
In The RuneLords by David Farland one of the characters (King Sylvarresta) describes how he played a chess match some years ago against the person who is now the main villain (Raj Ahten). Apparently, Raj (who in the book is supposed to have in effect a photographic memory and to be way smarter than any one man could possibly be) wins the chess match by trying to defend and control every single area (and specifically the corners) of the board. Now, as anyone who has ever played chess even half seriously knows, the begin and middle game is all about controlling the middle of the board. The player who controls the middle has a better mobility, flexibility and tactical position. This is fact. Any chump who tried to use Raj “the genius” Ahten’s tactic in a professional chess tournament would get soundly trounced. I had to roll my eyes when I read that chapter.
Grim
I gave up on Jordan when after reading the last two books - over 1000 pages - where nothing was said of any note and nothing was accomplished. It’s like fantasy purgatory, the story that never ends…
Another spoiler is a bit different…a friend reccomended Ann Perry to me and I read the first (I thought it was so-so) the friend hands me the next three and says isn’t it interesting how the author is a convicted murderer herself. I never managed to read another word she wrote - it kind of takes the fun out of murder mysteries when the author knows of which she writes…
Any sci-fi book that takes place in the future, involving the Soviet Union!!! ARGHHHH!!!
I dunno, Ellen, I spent a big chunk of my time in grad school researching 19th century women, so it’s kind of a hard thing to overlook. For you, though, maybe I’ll try.
I’m sorry I can’t remember either the author or the title - I was too traumatized, I suppose. I do remember it was a European author in translation, but I don’t think translation was the problem. It was a story of two buddies from different backgrounds who went through military school together, etc., etc., bonded brothers-in-arms and all. I got to one point where the author stated that only men know what true friendship is. If it had been the attitude of one of the characters, I could have put up with it as part of his particular mindset. But I’m supposed to accept this because omniscient author says so? Sorry. Put it down and could not pick it up again.
When The Offspring was much younger, she used to read The Babysitter series. Yeah, formula literature, but the kids enjoy it. Then she got to one that was supposed to take place in Hawaii and one of the characters wanders, disillusioned, along a beach where seagulls pick at some garbage. Okay, we have some garbage. We don’t have seagulls! That irritated her and she quit reading them.
Okay, about those borg cubes… Maybe the four cubes fragmented into two smaller cubers (by dividing and having each reform), and THEN have them all fuse?
My 8 YO son had brought home a book either for school summer reading or in conjunction with the library’s summer reading program. An early-reader chapter book, Jake Drake, Bully Buster, IIRC.
One of the points of the book is that this kid tames a class bully, and also learns a few things about him in the process, such as he has some artistic talent. The incident that brings this about is that the two of them are paired up to do a project and report on Massachusetts Native Americans (a Thanksgiving-y project, I believe).
At any rate, the author goes on about the research they do, and how the bully is very skillful in constructing the Native American village, including a great deal of detail about the really cool miniature tepees the kid builds.
Uh…sorry…that’s wrong, but you’ve been a great contestant and we have some lovely parting gifts for you, including the home version of our game and a full year’s supply of Dinty Moore beef stew.
New England natives built longhouses, doofus! Didn’t you do research? Didn’t your editor know this? Didn’t the copy-editor catch this? My wife teaches this stuff to her third graders! Eight-year-old know this. The Plains Indians utilized tepees, because they were more nomadic. Massachusetts Indians a) stayed put and b) didn’t have animals such as bison to provide big enough hides to make a relatively leak-proof tepee. Great snakes, they would have frozen to death in the winter! We’re talking New England!!!
Ahem…sorry. I just couldn’t believe that this got past everyone in the writing/editing/revision process, especially in a children’s book, where people are usually sticklers for accuracy.
Other than that, it wasn’t a bad book.
I read that and just thought, “eh…maybe Raj Ahten is so smart he knows something about chess no one else has discovered yet. Or, um, something like that.”
I gave up on Commodify Your Dissent, a collection of articles from The Baffler, about halfway through, when they started :rolleyes:-ing some culture magazine because they had the gall to say that Harvard Square’s street musicians made it a cool place to visit. I don’t remember their exact quote, but it was something along the lines of 'overprivileged students playing guitars bought by their parents are not artists." This pissed me off for three reasons.
I was already getting tired of the endless “Corporations tell you what to like, don’t believe them. By the way, this is what you should and shouldn’t like.”
The idea that someone who goes to a good school and has a bright future ahead is automatically disqualified from being an “artist” struck me as particularly arrogant. Kind of a faux-everyman elitism.
It was factually wrong. The vast majority (i.e. all but maybe an occasional one or two) of the street musicians around Harvard Square aren’t students. They’re the same “common man artist” The Baffler is supposedly in love with.
Sorry, I was a little ambiguous with ‘they’ and ‘their’. Let me try that again.
I confess that I have a nasty streak when it comes to David Foster Wallace, and that I was rather looking for a nit to pick. Imagine my satisfaction when I read his description of a round window, and later, he wrote about a mark in the corner of said window.
How about that LOTR movie?
I’m not gonna rant about how he left parts of the book out or anything, I wanna rant about the technical screw-ups.
He shows the orcs tearing down all the trees around Orthanc and throwing the wood into a big fire, and using that fire to forge weapons. CAN’T HAPPEN! You can’t get a fire hot enough with green wood (or just wood period) to forge steel. You need coal, charcoal, or gas.
In Moria, in the tomb-room (Chamber of Mazarbul, sp?) anyway, there’s this big window and this big shaft of sunlight shining down on Balin’s coffin. When the cave troll attacks, he repeatedly runs back and forth thru the shaft of light. IT SHOULD HAVE TURNED HIM TO STONE!!! Earlier in the movie, they even showed the trolls that were turned to stone by sunlight in the Hobbit. And that fat hairy director-dude keeps saying in interviews about how he carried the books around and was real religious about following them.
I have a few more, but I don’t wanna incite a LOTR pissing contest, so I’ll just keep them to myself.
Also, about 2001, I just wanna say, for all it’s faults, you gotta give props to Kubrick for being the only one to acknowledge in a major Sci-Fi flick that there is NO SOUND IN A VACUUM! That bugs me to no end, even as much as I love Star Wars. C’mon George!
Anyone have a site for anything about George Lucas responding to someone asking him why his starships make noise in a vacuum? I’d love to hear his explanation.
My sister loaned me a murder mystery whose main character was an inspector with a significant memory loss. I was a little disturbed to find out that the author, Anne Perry, actually helped murder her best friend’s mother. Apparently there was a movie made of the case called Heavenly Creatures.
Oh my God, I’ve seen Heavenly Creatures, I’ve heard that one of the girls involved in the real life case grew up to become a writer of murder mysteries, and I’ve read and enjoyed several of the Victorian Pitt novels- but I’ve never put it together until Doublemint and GKW mentioned her name. Wow.
In the bio section of anneperry.net, she writes at length, in first person, of life lessons she learned while growing up. Never mentions the murder, but does tell an anecdote about learning the importance of blind trust and obedience while recovering from an illness. Is that story a very indirect nod to the murder- she is implying that she was blindly obedient to her friend and accomplance? Or did this take place after the killing? Was that what the “illness” referred to meant? Interesting.
Um, add me to the list that won’t look at Anne Perry novels in the same way again.