So hey. I’m not officially back on duty yet — I’ll be back sometime in the next couple of days — but I thought I’d seed a little discussion here with what I’m calling The Official We Hunted the Mammoth Book Recommendation Thread.
Which is pretty self-explanatory, so have at it! Any genre, old or new. I will probably gather up the various suggestions for a later post or page.
And, yep, the book in the pic up there is a real book that exists, written by a fella named Peter Cheyney, and which you can buy on Amazon for the low, low price of $2,986.69. No, really.
That’s for a new copy. If you’re some kind of cheapskate, you could pick up a used copy instead, for a relatively thrifty $86.90.
Here are the first couple of paragraphs of the book, courtesy of Amazon, so you can have some idea what you’ll be getting for your money:
Is it hot!
I aint never been in hell, but Im tellin you that I bet it aint any hotter than this Californian desert in July.
I am drivin along past Indio an I figure that soon I am goin to see the Palm Springs lights. An I am goin some the speedometer says eighty. If it wasnt so hot it would be a swell night; but there aint any air, an there was a baby sand storm this afternoon that caught me asleep an I gotta lump of the Mojave desert or whatever they call it stuck right at the back of my throat
I strongly urge you to go to Amazon and click on the “look inside” tab to read more of Mr. Cheyney’s hardboiled prose.
Within the few short pages available in Amazon’s preview, the book’s narrator (tough guy private dick Lemmy Caution) not only manages to eat a lump of sand; he also orders a hamburger (at a hot dog joint) and some ham and eggs (at a second joint). It’s not clear if he eats any of the hamburger before splitting, but you’ll be glad to know that he at least starts eating the ham and eggs.
Oh, he also calls a guy a “sissy” and gets his ass kicked.
I know the book sounds truly amazing, but before you click the “buy” button, let me make a little counteroffer: if you’re really intent on spending $2,986.69 on a book titled “Dames Don’t Care,” pay me that amount, and I will write an entire new book by that name in the style of the original, more or less. For $86.90, I will write a (very) short story in the same style.
Or you could post book recommendations in the comments below. That’s good, too.
Here’s the full cover for Dames.
Moggie,
I know but didn’t want to hint at or spoil _that_ part of the book. I am normally not concerned about spoilers, but I know a lot of people care. I also like a lot Nora’s stile of writing, so for once I’m avoiding reading about Obelisk’s Gate until it is in my hands.
I would like to add to the the list of books I liked Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23943137-sorcerer-to-the-crown
It is a nice Victorian magical fantasy book with POC and woman protagonist, entertaining and well written.
I’d also like to second Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy.
A Cloudiah sighting! Yay!
@EJ – I haven’t read anything else of Calvino’s, but “The Baron In The Trees” is on my to-read-soon list. He’s such a charming and inventive writer. Do you have any favorites you can recommend?
Re: WR104, is the axis precessing, which is why sometimes it’s pointed straight at us and sometimes not? How certain are we that the system is oriented 90 degrees to us?
If there’s a chance we’re going to be killed by it, it should have a cooler name than “WR104”. Like “Gamma Murder Pinwheel”.
This sounds like a Bulwer-Lytton contest entry that didn’t know when to stop.
Currently reading Sins of Sumuru by Sax Rohmer out of weird curiosity. It’s quite a fun little potboiler so far, without the overt racism of Fu Manchu. All the manly men heroes are complete idiots who fall for the same obvious tricks repeatedly, while Sumuru herself has spent the entire book so far lounging about and occasionally shouting at people.
And I have to read the sequel, twice, because apparently the British and American editions have different endings.
@ buttercup
That sounds like the best episode of ‘Columbo’ ever.
Mind you, my previous adherence to the Copernican Principle is taking a bit of a battering as it turns out every murder star in the local vicinity is aiming right at us; can’t help but feel picked on.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
Baron starts well, but I thought it dragged in the second half. If on a winter’s night a traveler is bloody amazing.
Also: Gamma Murder Pinwheel is totally a band name.
EJ (The Other One):
My guess: he’s a WHTM lurker, saw your link here, and just posted the wall-o-text he posts anywhere he thinks feminists read.
Hendrake:
When I read the opening lines of the first chapter of The Obelisk Gate and saw that it was about Nassun, I noped right out of there. I can’t face learning part of what happened to Nassun and Jija.
Re Calvino:
If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller is an amazing book, one of the great metafictional novels. If you like postmodernism at all, definitely read it.
Invisible Cities is less metafictional but is just really good. (Or “and is really good” if you dislike metafiction.”)
Re stars rotating and stuff:
This might require a longer and very off-topic post because it requires me to teach y’all some physics. If you’re okay with that then great; otherwise I’ll stay on books.
@Moggie:
It gets funnier!
After I trashed the comment and posted the above, he sent a second comment:
Poor dude. Poor, poor dude. Even the straight white cismale STEM feminists don’t want to give him a soapbox. I can hear the sound of a nanoscale violin wafting plaintively through the air.
S
And of course the comments section is full of “Feminists are blowing this out of proportion” and “What about the mens” posts
@Alan:
After an enjoyable half hour spent doing nuclear physics calculations, I agree with Edward Teller: you cannot set the atmosphere on fire no matter how hard you try. Teller was probably upset that this was the case.
I’ll do some more calculations to see if I can come up with a more reasonable triggerable, instant world-destruction-device using some other mechanism.
@ EJ
They can be a lot of fun though so if no-one objects I’d love to hear.
ETA:
Since it seems crowdsourcing story ideas is on topic here, does anyone have any ideas for what could cause humans to start to forget any information they impart on someone else? e.g. if you tell someone your birthday, you forget it yourself. The most plausible idea I’ve come across so far is basically “self-replicating nanotechnology experiment gone wrong” – it’s convenient, but kinda bland.
For bonus marks, what are some reasonable constraints that can be put on it to help civilization find equilibrium? I feel like simply introducing “people forget things they teach” would be too degenerative and there wouldn’t be enough wiggle room for people to adapt (without perhaps becoming 100% solitary, and that’s not interesting), so I’m trying to think of the least contrived-sounding ways to help it balance out and make survival as a group more feasible. So, maybe the occasional person is immune and they become “teachers” that spread common knowledge, or certain types of communication are exempt, or being vague or imprecise could make a loophole.
@ Dlouwe
Oh I like that. It reminds me a bit of that ‘cartoon’ theory of diseases. You know, how if you have a cold and pass it on to someone else you no longer have it; like the cold is an actual object you can transfer?
I’ll have a think about a more real world solution.
@EJ (TOO)
No, but surely if you hurl enough antimatter into it you can at least make it very, very hot, right?
@Alan,
Hah, yeah, nearest to the “event” things would be incredibly confusing, and probably comical, though I’m more concerned how the world look hundreds of years down the line. I imagine that asking questions would just stop being a thing.
Also that raises why constraints are important; for instance I would want people to forget what their birthday is, but still remember that they told someone their birthday. This has been the trickiest part so far; trying to lay things out so that they “work” in a consistent manner, without being highly contrived, and simply enough that it retains the quickly grasped “oh that’s neat” factor of the main premise.
The obvious loophole is to just write everything down; if that makes the writer forget what they wrote they can just read it themselves. The problem, of course, being how to teach people to read in the future, solvable by audio recording.
Hundreds of years down the road, society would probably communicate almost exclusively by means that leave a record the speaker/writer can review.
@ Dlouwe
Perhaps you could have a literal ‘memory bank’; a place where people go to tell important things to professional rememberers.
Of course the issue arises as to how you’d remember that there was such a place. The bank could employ people to go out and remind their customers; but then would the employees instantly forget where they worked?
Wow, this is pleasantly mind boggling (and as I’m still at work nicely distracting) 🙂
@ Mysterious creature
Yes, but is she eating bonbons?
@ Dlouwe
Argh, don’t think about the event; you’ll make it come back!!!!
https://youtu.be/l28o6fJda1c
Josh and Nikki – I just finished Stephen King’s “Mr. Mercedes” and was pleasantly surprised to find it was one of his rare novels that didn’t involve anything supernatural.* I was particularly pleased with his treatment of a character with mental illness, who was one of the heroes.
CW for incest, though.
The last story of his that did involve the supernatural, and that I enjoyed was “1408” from the “Everything’s Eventual” collection of stories. The movie wasn’t nearly as creepy though, IMHO!
*My favorite King book is “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” which was very intense and gripping.
@Alan and Guy
Yeah, written/recorded information raises some complications – or rather, it makes things not quite as degenerative as I’d like. The setting I’m aiming for things to balance out at is at a sort of “soft” post-apocalypse; everything is doing fine except for humans. Technology and its advancement are severely hampered. Sustainable populations are much much smaller.
I’ve toyed around with the idea that something can only be read once and then becomes unintelligible afterwards, which I like for plot reasons (people could collect an “inheritance” of written knowledge to pass on when they die), but have trouble thinking of a good mechanical reason for that to be so.
If I had $3000 to do with what I pleased, I’d consider it. Your version of Dames would be well worth the read, David.
(Unfortunately the reality is I’d be happy if someone gave me $3000 to pay my own bills. Unemployment sucks.)
@dlouwe
People have forgotten how to write by hand and technology is on the decline, so they share written info through some kind of tech that’s write-once, read-once, maybe?