Tag: books

Book review: The Married Man Sex Life Primer

I have posted a review of Athol Kay’s new book at Alpha Game. It’s well worth reading by men and women alike, regardless of whether one is actually married or not. For a different perspective, albeit a similar conclusion, the Hawaiian Libertarian has also posted a review of the book.

Those who have been following the saga of Alpha Game’s resident omega or simply doubt the efficacy of Game may also be interested to read the results of his first-ever successful date at the age of 28. And finally, I answer Susan Walsh’s questions regarding whether gender equality in the bedroom inhibits arousal and explain why feminists are not merely anti-sex, but downright anti-sexy.

The peril of the popular intellectual

No matter how copiously one cites the pertinent studies which purportedly prove your assertions, there is always the danger that someone might actually take your ideasthe ridiculous ideas of someone else you have popularized seriously enough to put them to an empirical test:

On his 30th birthday, June 27, 2009, Dan had decided to quit his job to become a professional golfer.

He had almost no experience and even less interest in the sport.

What he really wanted to do was test the 10,000-hour theory he read about in the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller Outliers. That, Gladwell wrote, is the amount of time it takes to get really good at anything — “the magic number of greatness.”…

The Dan Plan will take six hours a day, six days a week, for six years. He is keeping diligent records of his practice and progress. People who study expertise say no one has done quite what Dan is doing right now.

It’s not exactly a secret that the middlebrow Gladwell is completely full of it. His books appeal primarily to the half-educated, -1 to +1 SD intellects that soak up information insufficiently critically to notice the unsound foundation upon which most of his conclusions are based. Of course, Readers Digest created a small empire catering to the tastes of such readers, so there are not only a lot of them, but they tend to read more than the norm in search of that feeling of intellectual self-improvement that Gladwell sells so effectively.

It should be interesting to hear Gladwell attempt to explain away the inevitable failure of his thesis. Perhaps he’ll even get another best-selling book out of it.

Amazon and some publishing decisions

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve arranged to set up as an Amazon Associate, so if you order books from them in the future, doing it through here will contribute to the Publishing Fund. This is intended to be a means of funding more self-publishing through Kindle and eventually other forms of ebooks and perhaps hardcovers as well. So, if you’re thinking of ordering something through Amazon, consider doing it from here.

I’m still working on Summa Elvetica II, which will not be done for quite some time because I am attempting to make it a stronger and deeper book than its predecessor, which involves a good deal of research and world-building. That isn’t really relevant to the self-publishing project, however, since Marcher Lord will likely publish it. So, I’ve also been working on the non-fiction title Alpha Game, which I expect to finish and publish this summer; I’d proposed it to WND Books, but they found the subject to be out of their comfort zone and passed on it.

However, I’ve had a number of requests for publishing column collections, which never really struck me as being a proper book per se, but is apparently de rigueur among columnnists. I noticed that three of my George Will “books” are actually just column collections accompanied by some introductory commentary. So, I have two questions. First, is there any interest in a book or three of column collections? Second, would there be more interest in books that collect the columns by subject or by publication date? Just to be clear, I’d probably do the columns in annotated format in order to update them with regards to the mistakes I’d made or to note how subsequent events rendered them relevant or irrelevant. The ebooks would be sold for $2.99, as per Amazon’s new program.

I’m also going to be putting out Kindle versions of the three Eternal Warriors novels at the $2.99 price in case anyone is interested in them.

A Song vs The First Law

Like many George R.R. Martin fans, I have re-read A Game of Thrones in order to refresh my memory prior to the advent of the HBO television series. I actually wound up re-reading all four books, as you do, which should come in handy with the scheduled release of A Dance with Dragons later this summer. But since I’d so recently read four of Joe Abercrombie’s books, which have occasionally been compared with Martin’s series due to their similarly dark and violent nature, I thought it might be interesting to compare the similarities and differences between the two epic fantasy series.

Books you must not read

The Telegraph provides fifty to avoid:

41 Courage by Gordon Brown: A tantalising prequel to the former PM’s future publications: “How to Get a Good Price for Your Gold”, “Debt Management for Dummies” and “Workplace Harmony”.

42 Jordan: Pushed to the Limit by Katie Price: Disappointingly thin on insights into the Hashemite Kingdom east of Israel.

43 Saturday by Ian McEwan: What the author learnt after spending two years getting in the way of a neurosurgeon. Not as good as Enduring Love, which is not as good as Amsterdam, which is not as good as Atonement.

44 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières: Loved for its description of wartime Cephalonia, but now ruined by the constant appearance during civil partnership ceremonies of the passage about tree roots.

45 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown: Useful only as a shorthand to know whom to avoid on the Tube.

46 Twilight by Stephenie Meyer: See above, especially if they’re grown-ups, who really should not be fixating on vampires.

47 Harry Potter… by JK Rowling: See above, especially if they’re grown-ups reading a version with an adult cover.

48 One Day by David Nicholls: A wonderful book that follows a relationship over 20 years, spoilt only by people telling you how wonderful it is, while trying not to give away the ending (hint: very, very sad).

49 Scouting for Boys by Robert Baden-Powell: Awkward to ask for in a book shop.

50 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Scouting for girls.

This list inspired me to come up with a list of six SF/F books you must not read.

Abercrombie’s inquisition

So, I finished reading Abercrombie’s The First Law series. I quite liked it despite the various criticisms I’ve mentioned in the past, but I wanted to mention something that struck me about the book’s most interesting character, the torturer of the Royal Inquisition, Sand dan Glotka. Abercrombie devotes a great deal of time and attention to Glotka and it shows. His backstory is involved and interesting, his descent from superficial hero to deeply introspective anti-hero is compelling, and he manages to come off in a sympathetic manner despite the many awful deeds he consciously elects to perform. There is only one significant problem with the character of Glotka.

The greater part of the Inquisition as portrayed in The First Law is a load of historical bollocks.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

Book review: The Heroes

The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie
Orbit (560 pages, $24.99, February 2011)

After the lively discussion of two weeks ago regarding the decline and fall of modern fantasy fiction begun by Leo Grin, I find a certain ironic pleasure in being able to unequivocally declare that Joe Abercrombie is, without question, the best writer of fantasy military fiction being published today. Were it not for the fictitious medievalesque setting, The Heroes would barely qualify as fantasy at all, but even so, as pure military fiction, Abercrombie compares favorably with David Drake, Ralph Peters, David Weber, and even Tom Clancy post-Red Storm Rising. I quite enjoyed the book and very much look forward to reading more of Abercrombie’s dark and bloody work in the future.

The Heroes is a stand-alone novel that utilizes many characters from Abercrombie’s popular epic nihilism series, The First Law. It is a small-scale tale of a three-day battle between the Union and the newly crowned King of the North, and is somewhat reminiscent of historical tales of Gettysburg and other epic battles in the way the action tends to revolve around the physical environment, such as the prehistoric monuments on the large hill that provide the novel with its title. The title is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, as it happens, given that the theme of the book, smashed home as ferociously as one of Abercrombie’s anti-hero’s heavy swords hammers into the skull of a defeated enemy, is that there are no heroes and victorious battles and heroic deeds alike go ultimately for naught.

Read the rest of the review of The Heroes at the Black Gate

A long-awaited dance

I can’t pretend that I’m anywhere nearly as excited as a lot of epic fantasy fans are, but I will probably re-read the series in order to refresh my memory before reading the next book in the series:

Great news for fans of epic fantasy today: The great George R. R. Martin has announced on his web page that the long, long-awaited 5th book in his SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series is almost done. No kidding this time. A DANCE WITH DRAGONS will be hitting stories on July 12, 2011. Although previous dates have been set and then cancelled, Martin says this one is “for real.”

I generally enjoy the Fire and Ice series, but I thought the last book, divided into two, bordered on the tedious and didn’t advance the story much. Like pitchers, writers tend to lose their fastball abruptly, and often without any warning. I suspect Martin’s inability to finish the book in a reasonable time frame after turning in a relatively mediocre, (in comparison with the standard he’d previously set, you understand) prior novel doesn’t bode well for A Dance with Dragons, but I will be pleased to be proved wrong in July.

Defining epic

Matthew David Surridge attempts to define it:

[W]e decided to take a stab at coming up with a definition for epic fantasy ourselves. We decided to first list a number of texts that seemed clearly ‘epic fantasies,’ and try to work out what they had in common. In the process, we also thought of texts that seemed close but which we felt not to be epics, and texts that really seem to be on the margins of the epic; any genre definition is a fuzzy set, and some things will seem in the genre and some out of it depending on how you look at them. At any rate, while it seemed likely that the defintion we’d arrive at would be somewhat conservative — at best describing what epic fantasy has been so far, not necessarily what it is or could be — it seemed worth doing, just to try to establish what people think of when they talk about epic fantasy. If you have any counter-suggestions, or texts that you’d like to put forward as possible epics, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The core texts that we came up with, by a fairly quick process of word-association, were: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara, David Eddings’ Belgariad, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s The Wheel of Time, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Deathgate Cycle, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders Trilogy, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series, R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series, and Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. In many cases only one of us had read the books in question; in a couple of cases, notably Erikson and Bakker, it has to be said neither of us had read all the books of the series. In some cases neither of us liked the books much, but this was not an evaluative process, simply definitional.

As we discussed what we thought was and wasn’t epic fantasy, the marginal cases we found were Ursula Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and Glen Cook’s Black Company series. Things that looked like epic fantasy, but which one or another of us felt strongly were not, were Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

Attempting to justify what we felt was and wasn’t epic fantasy, we came up with the following characteristics of the fantasy epic: Firstly, it has to have a certain length. Ideally, at least three thick books. I’ve seen The Lord of the Rings estimated at 400,000 words, which seems about right; The Sword of Shannara I’ve seen estimated as 265,000 words, so let’s set 250,000 words as an absolute minimum, with a reasonable expectation of much more.

Epic fantasy is one of those things that I suspect is easier to recognize than define. Tolkien is clearly epic. Eddings is clearly epic. I don’t think Carey feels epic in any way, shape or form; even though one could make a rational case for it, I think the argument for Zelazny’s Amber is stronger than for Carey’s Kushiel. I also think that both the original Dragonlance trilogy and the Twins trilogy are far more epic than Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, even though the latter is clearly higher quality literature. But certainly Surridge’s approach is the correct one, the challenge is to reasonably draw the line between that which is epic and that which is not epic. The primary omission thus far, in my opinion, is is Steven Erikson’s prodigiously epic Malazan Book of the Fallen, even if it isn’t always what I would tend to consider particularly readable or even necessarily plotted.

UPDATE – Erikson wasn’t omitted at all. Let this serve as an object lesson in why one should read carefully before opining.