bans Zwiffle from this thread. 

If you're just going to suggest shitty books I don't want to be here anyway. 

I read A Game of Thrones last summer, and was intrigued by it enough to read A Clash of Kings this summer. Some aspects of both books and the universe they are set in annoyed me, but overall they were both pretty good, if a little too epic like most fantasy. Now I'm reading a book of Glen Cook's early short stories, that should be exactly the right antidote to "too epic-ness." 

on game of thrones,

i originally got the first book after a discussion with some random cashier dude at the local computer parts store...

he brought it up when i expressed my annoyance with wheel of time, and how about 75% of the characters are just plain unlikeable. it *is* possible to have likable villains after all.

game of thrones is filled with likable characters, or at least characters that you can understand why they are pieces of shit. from that point alone i would recommend the book because even if you don't really like the direction the story is heading in, you can at least root for almost all the characters. 

I've never read Wheel of Time but it seems like generic fantasy; I agree that Game of Thrones is more interesting than the genre average which seems to be largely character-free, the dwarf character for example (Tyrion) is awesome. 

yeah, wheel of time has some really great things. one of my favourite is the magic system. it's very scientific in that there's no inexplicable wand waving but instead concrete rules that the system functions on. it's thing like that they make me wish i could stand most of the characters behaving like complete and utter morons. 

anyone given this a read?

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6965582-ass-goblins-of-auschwitz 

ass goblins. i'm totally insulting someone with that today. 

First book of China's that I've read, and I love his writing style. It's smooth and largely cliche free, sometimes bordering on poetry instead of prose.

The characters themselves are pretty interesting, there wasn't really a good guy but rather a bunch of anti-heroes with differing desires. They range from the mundane (Shekel) to the downright creepy and bizarre (The Lovers) with most everything in between (Kruach Aum or whatever his name was.)

The plot was alright, but I kind of wish it ended a little more ... resolutely than it did.

SPOILER - they ended up putting in all that effort (and thus most of the story) really for nothing, forfeiting their prize and the sacrifices they made when their goal was finally within reach. /SPOILER

I'm totally intrigued by all the places/people of Bas-Lag, and I'm pretty into China's writing style, so I think I will probably check out his other stuff as well. 

Ass Goblins. 

shouldn't this maybe go in the drunk thread?
btw I thought it was ass pirates. shows how much I know about internet terminology. 

YOU EEDIOT! 

I read Accelerando by Charles Stross this past summer and found it quite enjoyable. It starts out something like a near future cyberpunk Neal Stephenson novel, but then, well, accelerates into something else entirely. Lots of speculation about where AIs, nanotech, transhumanism, etc might take us as a species. The writing is technical at times, which can be fun if you understand what Stross is talking about. (for instance, speculative discussion of futuristic routers, firewalls, and network protocols)

There is a sequel as well, called Glass House, that I have not read and I've heard that it doesn't really directly follow from the first book's story or tie up its loose ends. 

I can't remember which else of his I've read, I read several in rapid succession and now they're all blurred in my memory :-)

Something I found strangely satisfying about the ministry stories is that the lead character's love life is important to the plot, but there's no contrived rom-com style stress between the two of them, 

 

finished reading ringworld a few days ago.

i love scifi that makes humans caught in the machinations of another more ridiculously advanced species. 

Welcome to having good taste in books.

Get Perdido Street Station obviously. Iron Council is skippable.

The City And The City is completely unrelated but is great. 

Thanks, I've been here for a quite a while now. 

Currently reading" Our Enemy, The State" by Albert Jay Nock. 

THIS

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Equal-Rights-International-Materialism/dp/1931859337/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1288744758&sr=8-12

The Anti anti-state book written by China Mieville! 

Those silly statists. 

Iain M. Banks' latest. It's not exactly bad, but it's certainly not very good either. I read it on a 13 hour flight and it was fine for that purpose -- but I said the same thing about the A Team movie :-)

This review gets it about right: http://totalscifionline.com/reviews/5588-surface-detail 

Stupid. Just awful. Avoid. 1/2 out of 10, would have gotten a 1/10 if Sharrow died at the end too. 

Do you like books, Zwiffle?

If I was reading anything less than 3/10, I wouldn't even GET to the end...