May 7 2002, 8:00 am
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Leftley
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Basically anything by Isaac Asimov. Granted, most of my favorite works of his are short stories, but those short stories kick more ass than most of the full-length novels I've ever read.
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Then if you want short good books I'd say either Piers Anthony and the Xanth novels, Yup, Xanth falls into the category of my favourite books. I own the enumerated series from A Spell for Chameleon to Geis of the Gargoyle (I've been falling behind on the latter novels of the series). Paraphrasing one of my favourite quotes from Harpy Thyme: "You're being punished for drinking, gamboling, and having secs." "Well, it was hot, so I needed to have some water, and then my feet got hot, so I needed to dance a little, and... what was that last one?" Any real punner ought to get Xanth novels post-haste. Well, present-haste. | |
I like his mysteries, but only because they're very predictable and so reading them provides an inevitable ego boost.
One big problem Mr. Asimov had is that his chapter/story titles always give away too much... if you read his commentary on his mysteries, you'll see that in most cases, his editors had to change the names of most of the stories because first choice told you exactly where to look for the clues. Much of his Foundation series suffered from the same problem, at least the books that had chapter titles. | |
I like Piers Anthony, but he gets so repetitive... he reuses the same themes and archetypes throughout all of his serieses, over and over again... also, he never seems to take his own female characters seriously. The men are all archetypes, but the women are stereotypes.
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Some of the funniest stories ever written were written by Edgar Allen Poe, a person most people remember only as a horror writer. He was also a satirist and hoaxer of the same caliber as Mark Twain, although a good deal less prolific in those areas. "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esquire", for instance, is a brilliant and timeless reflection on the state of the publishing industry, and delivers fully on the promise of the title.
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Lesbian Assassin wrote:
I like Piers Anthony, but he gets so repetitive... he reuses the same themes and archetypes throughout all of his serieses, over and over again... also, he never seems to take his own female characters seriously. The men are all archetypes, but the women are stereotypes. I haven't read any of Anthony's books other than the Xanth ones, mainly because I haven't reached that point in my life which I call "archive-investigation mode". I don't disagree with the archetypical versus stereotypical observation, though. There's almost no difference between any of the female characters in any of the Xanth novels. Heck, even Jenny the Elf, who isn't human (or elven, actually) at all, acts just the same as the rest of them. Hmm... I don't think I want to discuss the nymphs. | |
Spuzzum wrote:
Lesbian Assassin wrote: I think I stopped reading Piers Anthony when it became clearer and clearer that he seems to have a "thing" for very young/underage girls. I'm not trying to say more than that, just that his treatment of those characters started to turn me off. That and the fact that his more popular series tend to be written at about the junior high level - I guess I stopped right about the time I was entering college, about 10 years ago. That said, I remember really enjoying most of the Incarnations of Immortality series. It started to go downhill by the end and I never bothered to read the last book. Xanth was good, especially in the beginning, but as I said, I haven't read the last 10 or so books judging from what's current. I remember really enjoying the Apprentice Adept series - it combined fantasy and science fiction in a pretty cool way. And probably the best PA novel I've read was Mute. The writing level seemed to be a bit higher than most of his more popular stuff, but then that was a long time ago, so I could be remembering wrong. | |
Vicious wrote:
Please post your favorite book, any type and include a summary. The Lord of The Rings set including the book "The Hobbit" is great. I also like anything that is part of the "Forgotten Realms" books. However, I dont really feel like typing up a summary, so no summary. | |
anarchy is stupid if there was no govenment there would be no free market competition without free market competition people would not compete with eachother and if you didnt know competition makes people invent new ways to do things so yeah....no techonological advancements
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Thiaoouba Prophecy
Quote: "Technology should assist spiritual development, not confine people, more and more, within a materialistic world, as is happening now on your planet." This book is too important to miss. Please read it. If you can't afford it, it is available online for free. /Andreas | |
VyseDyne wrote:
anarchy is stupid if there was no govenment there would be no free market competition without free market competition people would not compete with eachother and if you didnt know competition makes people invent new ways to do things so yeah....no techonological advancements Competition also makes people life miserable. Cooperation is better. (Note: I didn't say anarchy is good) /Anreas | |
WOw I can't believe no one's commented on the A Song of Ice and Fire series!!
It's by far the best, with each chapter changing the story around and George R.R. Martin is not an author with happy endings... he likes to kill everyone off and add new people into the mix... I recommend anyone that likes really action packed/romance/deceit/cunning books to read this one, it has just about everything in it! :) | |
Gazoot wrote:
VyseDyne wrote: I agree totally. If the Lung Cancer society, the Breast Cancer society, the Heart Disease society, and so on and so forth... if they all got together, they could find a cure for cancer in a decade or two, and a cure for lung disease in another decade, and a cure for heart disease in another decade after that. But no, they have to have individual societies, so people will donate to specific victims rather than lumping cancer into one bag and helping prevent it in the future. There is some truth to the statement that competition breeds invention. "Necessity is the mother of all invention", and if you aren't competing, you have no necessity to be first. Even so, combined efforts work much more strongly than individual separate efforts. There might be more interesting and unique developments if everyone worked apart, but if everyone cooperated they would get one thing that worked and worked well. (Er, no, I'm not a Marxist. ;-) ) | |
Leftley wrote:
Basically anything by Isaac Asimov. Granted, most of my favorite works of his are short stories, but those short stories kick more ass than most of the full-length novels I've ever read. I liked the collection of short stories Isaac Asimov put together. (I think he edited them, but did not write them.) However, there seemed to be so many to collect. The only book I have is Wizards, which I got for free. | |
Gawk all you want. Its guys like you who dont think things through, and make absence of goverment hard to face, do you have to be lead around on a leash?
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yes we have to because in the state of nature the strong would kill the weak so the weak would have to get together to kill the strong...you know this is true without leadership
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Even so, combined efforts work much more strongly than individual separate efforts. There might be more interesting and unique developments if everyone worked apart, but if everyone cooperated they would get one thing that worked and worked well. Well, yeah, but that's kind of like saying "if everyone was [insert color here], there would be no racial strife" -- it's true enough, but there's no way to move from the heterogenous to the homogenous state without abominable deeds (like genocide) and/or cataclysmic events (like a selective plague). Of course, that's an imperfect analogy, because it only considers one (rather drastic) way of removing the source of the strife. Instead of removing the condition that irrationally provokes discord, you could remove the irrationality that allows itself to be provoked -- i.e., attempt to modify the framework of human thought, perhaps over generations, so that discordant thoughts would be literally unthinkable. To a degree, that's certainly doable, and in fact in 1984 the government seems to have a fairly promising multifaceted plan to achieve it fully -- though again, to achieve that level of harmony, a good deal of abominable deeds go with the territory. My own suspicion is that, regardless of the many individuals who may achieve total "selflessness" in the pursuit of a common cause, human nature in the aggregate just isn't geared toward cooperation at all costs. Sooner or later, someone will stand on a matter of principle or sheer orneriness, and the unified project will divide; or the project leaders will do some bludgeoning to keep everyone in line; or the project leaders will allow the project to branch out into multiple efforts that have various degrees of overlap (which, going back to the analogy, you could probably view as representative of the American approach, at least in the area of pure speech: you're free to badmouth whomever you want for whatever reason you want, but don't be surprised if it makes you unpopular and you miss out on a lot of neat stuff, not to mention neat potential friends). In terms of the previous post, I bet some of those medical foundations share research among themselves, just as I also bet there are a few that aren't on "speaking terms" because of some petty grudge between the governing boards. And that's why I'm preparing to abandon the BYOND community to build my own game system, MAHADANGTI ("Mad As Hell At Dantom And Not Gonna Take It"). Sure, I'm not mad at them now, but I don't want to be caught without a plan when the time comes. :) | |
Lesbian Assassin wrote:
One big problem Mr. Asimov had is that his chapter/story titles always give away too much... Humorous, given that in his autobiography (yes I read them *all*), he was quite annoyed at John Campbell Jr, an important editor in his life, because Campbell would always give blurbs to his stories that gave away the ending. | |
