Simon: You are my beautiful sister. River: I threw up on your bed. Simon: Yep. Definitely my sister.

'War Stories'


Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."


meara - Mar 05, 2006 11:36:33 am PST #107 of 28061

If that sounds dry and boring, well, I thought so too, which is why I put off reading it for so long despite the raves from my friends and people I trust

If a reader doesn't like Dickens and Austen, though, I suspect they wouldn't it. And maybe even if they did

Heh. Before reading the sec ond quote, i was about to say "Comparing it to Dickens doesn't make me want to go run and pick it up, even if everyone says it's good!"


§ ita § - Mar 05, 2006 12:45:42 pm PST #108 of 28061
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

The book is too damned long. I'm reading it, and I'm liking it, every page, but I do feel impatient nonetheless. I'm never finishing it at my current rate of consumption--it keeps getting longer as I go.


Strix - Mar 05, 2006 4:27:10 pm PST #109 of 28061
A dress should be tight enough to show you're a woman but loose enough to flee from zombies. — Ginger

I read it, was very "eh." I'd re-read it if it were the only book in jail, but I didn't see what all the fuss what about.

Lukewarm, if not chilly.


meara - Mar 05, 2006 4:28:46 pm PST #110 of 28061

Anyone read this on scifi in the NYTimes? I was...irked.


DXMachina - Mar 05, 2006 4:51:26 pm PST #111 of 28061
You always do this. We get tipsy, and you take advantage of my love of the scientific method.

He seems absolutely clueless about what he's been reading. It's just occurring now to him that science fiction often has wooden characters in support of a plot only a geek could love? It's hard to take him at all seriously when he includes Cats Cradle among his 10 best list, and calls it:

The perfect, Platonic balance of science and fiction, one that still finds room for merciless satire and a moral that resonates to the present day: that self-destruction is mankind's one true calling.

I love that book, but it has barely a passing acquaintance with science.


Consuela - Mar 05, 2006 4:52:32 pm PST #112 of 28061
We are Buffistas. This isn't our first apocalypse. -- Pix

Yeah, everyone knows that no current science fiction writers give a damn about character or emotion. t rolls eyes forever


DebetEsse - Mar 05, 2006 4:55:11 pm PST #113 of 28061
Woe to the fucking wicked.

No, those books are called "Literary fiction" now.


meara - Mar 05, 2006 4:55:34 pm PST #114 of 28061

Yeah, everyone knows that no current science fiction writers give a damn about character or emotion.

No kidding. He seems like the perfect person to talk about scifi, since he loves it SO MUCH. Or not. Yeesh. I mean, it's one thing to be bitchy about a specific book, but to sweepingly say the whole genre sucks, in your first column (at least I"m assuming first--the front page is all "New SciFi column!")? Um. Way to piss off the people who would be reading you.


beth b - Mar 05, 2006 4:55:59 pm PST #115 of 28061
oh joy! Oh Rapture ! I have a brain!

yep, I'll go with annoying


Strega - Mar 05, 2006 5:32:46 pm PST #116 of 28061

to sweepingly say the whole genre sucks, in your first column

I don't see where he says that. Or what he does say that isn't true.