What?  "The Name of the Wind" was amazing imo.  It was crazy long though. And almost all fantasy pales in comparison to "A Storm of Swords."

If you're a fan of Stephin Merritt's band The Magnetic Fields, I believe he provided a song (performing as "The Gothic Archies") at the end of a lot of the audiobooks, and Daniel Handler (the un-pseudonymed non-fictional identity of Snicket) played accordion on a few Magnetic Fields songs.  Decent number of accordion…

I think the post-metal band Isis was influenced by "House of Leaves" while recording their album "In the Absence of Truth".  Although I'm not sure how much legitimate connection there is between the two, and Isis definitely isn't everyone's cup of tea, especially if you don't like long,…

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet" is another amazing book by David Mitchell, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who liked "Cloud Atlas", especially if you enjoyed the way that he approached the more archaic writing styles of the first character (Ewing?) in Cloud Atlas.  I actually liked "Thousand Autumns"…

What the actual fuck is the moral of that story supposed to be?

But I bet that as a loyal liberal, if you were reading the latest book from Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck you'd probably have even more of the everloving shit depressed out of you by the absolute disgusting absurdity of it and by the fact that a not-insubstantial fraction of the population will fervently agree with…

Reading "Blood Meridian" made me feel like an uncultured idiot for all the time I had to spend looking up all the obscure words and Spanish dialogue

"The Road" is considerably less grotesque, yet considerably more bleak and depressing.

Speaking of Robert Jordan, I'm about a third of the way through "The Shadow Rises" (fourth book in The Wheel of Time.  I'll probably see if I can get through book 6 or 7 by the end of January (very possibly an overly optimistic estimate), but I doubt I'll be getting around to "A Memory of Light" until some time this…

I'm mostly looking forward to the chapters where his girlfriend will constantly be at home surfing the web or talking on the phone instead of being at her job at the vet's office.

I sort of felt like Mitchell was playing around with the idea of "undying love from the first sight" rather than simply falling for a lazy trope.  There's always this undertone of all the European guys in the book being into Japanese women for being "exotic", and even though DeZoet was legitimately in love with the…

I sort of felt like Mitchell was playing around with the idea of "undying love from the first sight" rather than simply falling for a lazy trope.  There's always this undertone of all the European guys in the book being into Japanese women for being "exotic", and even though DeZoet was legitimately in love with the…

You're just jealous of Handler because you didn't write a book with a tap-dancing ballerina princess veterinarian!

You're just jealous of Handler because you didn't write a book with a tap-dancing ballerina princess veterinarian!

I've always meant to read it unabridged, as it was pretty fantastic though at times clumsily cobbled together in its abridged form.

I've always meant to read it unabridged, as it was pretty fantastic though at times clumsily cobbled together in its abridged form.

So, this is a kind of an only-tangentially-connected-to-this-story question, but is "The Prestige" the kind of movie where one should read the book first, if reading the book first is the kind of thing that one tends to do in the first place?

So, this is a kind of an only-tangentially-connected-to-this-story question, but is "The Prestige" the kind of movie where one should read the book first, if reading the book first is the kind of thing that one tends to do in the first place?

My favorite book of 2012 was "Home", in part due to the fact that it was great, and in part due to the fact that it was the only book released in 2012 that I actually read last year.  
I read a decent number of non-2012 books though.  Finished the last four books of "A Song of Ice and Fire", Thoreau's "Walden", "The…

My favorite book of 2012 was "Home", in part due to the fact that it was great, and in part due to the fact that it was the only book released in 2012 that I actually read last year.  
I read a decent number of non-2012 books though.  Finished the last four books of "A Song of Ice and Fire", Thoreau's "Walden", "The…