Hacker News Books

For work : Rework, from 37signals. Fresh, opinionated and funny.

For leisure : A Dance with Dragons, from Georges R.R. Martin "Game of Thrones" series (the HBO version is superb, but do not miss the books either).

Currently reading GRRM's A Dance With Dragons in hardcover. Brutal! I read the first four on my Kobo (I'm Canadian) and it was a much more enjoyable aesthetic experience.

I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't read any books (beside some programming related stuff) in over a year. But I did start reading A game of thrones in the middle of August this year, now I'm on page 300 of the A dance with dragons. Simply amazing book.

Love, love, LOVE the idea - It's one of those things that I would use every week if it worked.

Critical feedback from a potential fan:

#1 - When looking at best sellers, one of the first things I saw was, "A Dance With Dragons, 29 critic reviews | Published: August 28, 2012" - The "Published" date is obviously for something different than the book (Softcover? Trade Press?) - regardless, for book reviews what's most important is not the publication of the format (I can get that at Amazon in 2 seconds) - but the publication of the _content_

#2 - I wanted to see how Peter Hamilton's books were reviewed (very popular author, so lots of reviews of his work out there), so I typed, "Peter Hamilton" and got 17 hits, but not a single one for Peter Hamilton's books. Typing the same thing in Amazon.com, despite how common the name is, got me a page of hits comprising _only_ the Science Fiction author Peter Hamilton.

In general, it's better to focus on the 99% of what users are looking for than the long tail. Not sure if you just don't have all of the reviews entered here, but the content needs bulking up before you introduce this to the general populace.

Love the idea - I'll check in from month to month to see how it comes along.

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand a revelation, much like encountering Tolstoy for the first time via Anna Karenina.

A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin, is the Tolkien of our times, but with a dark and raunchy twist ;-) Almost finished; book 6 is a year or more away if previous publishing trend continues -- we needs it ;-(

I'm subscribed to Audible as well; I generally like it.

The 2 credit per month plan covers my needs pretty well. In some occasions I've had to buy extra credits, but it still ends up being much cheaper than buying individual audiobooks.

It definitely pushes you to strike a balance between longer and shorter books, though. It's kinda crazy that a 4-hour story like The Magic Goes Away and a a 50-hour novel like A Dance with Dragons both end up consuming 1 credit.

I think HBO just made it way easier. Once I heard the series would be a show, I knew we'd never get any more books because the lull between A Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons was something like 5 years. At that rate, he'd need another 15 to be done while gallivanting on other fantasy titles/collections/anthologies/wtf and endorsing everything under the sun once the first three books gave him clout.

I'm definitely a little bitter about it, but I've accepted it. Parris needs the royalties.

/salt: Somehow, within that time, Robin Hobb managed to spit out a trilogy seemingly once a quarter. Thankfully, Steven Erikson came along and wrote The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which, if you like books, honestly puts ASoIaF to shame on numerous levels (and has the benefit of being done).

19,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even my age group, let alone the general populace (I'm 20).

That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm not familiar with. Most of the ones I missed are words I recognize from this series, although since I'm not 100% sure of them, so I left them unchecked.

Vox, as a publisher, is hardly an unbiased source.

> But in fact, the lawsuit seeks financial damages only for the sharing of 127 books under copyright, including titles like Gone Girl, A Dance with Dragons, and The Catcher in the Rye. If the court awards the plaintiffs the maximum amount provided under the law, the most the Internet Archive would have to pay would be $19 million — essentially equivalent to one year of operating revenue, according to IA tax documents. That’s a huge setback, but for the IA, a tech nonprofit that relies heavily on grants and public donations, it’s not the major death blow it might seem to be.

Okay, but two things:

1. This opens up the door to other publishers to do the same thing.

2. $150,000 per book is clearly excessive.

The point of reading for entertainment is to:

1. Have fun.

If you don't like the book you're reading, put it down. Life is too short for bad books.

2. Leave a general impression on you.

For example, some books just change your outlook on life. Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, or Pierce Brown's Red Rising trilogy, or Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastard's trilogy are all great series that take you on emotional roller-coasters, make you change you perspective on life, etc.

Reading makes people more empathic, and kinder. It helps give you different points of view. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315838511_Turner_R_...)

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

I eagerly read the first 3 books without ever considering abandoning any of them and I subscribe to the yank-the-bandage approach to dropping books if not interesting within 20 pages or, towards the end, abandoning if I find myself skimming or skipping pages. With these, it never happened.

When I read the 4th book, however, A Dance with Dragons, I kept reading far longer than I would any other book, hoping that it would get better and start getting somewhere. It never did. It was a slow motion train wreck. Finally, I threw in the towel and dropped it with no desire to ever go back and finish it or the 5th book. It did strengthen my resolve to drop bad books early even if prior books by the author were great reads.

Yes, that's a definite possibility. I feel like it's less of a risk with a videogame that's got scope limitations, especially in relations to the system it has to run on, but it happens regularly with all sorts of books, more so the ones published on a regular tight schedule (think weekly comic books or webnovels). But even publications without deadlines can get impacted if the author isn't disciplined. George R. R. Martin famously wrote himself into a corner around the time of A Dance with Dragons and nobody has any hope left he'll get around to finishing ASOIAF. He tried to get away with it by using a cathedral and bazaar metaphor.

The reason fantasy (and also much scifi these days) needs the length is partly because once you've gone to all that effort of establishing a world, you'll want to stick that world.

A short novel with a completely unique setting would turn a fantasy story into something closer to a fairy tale or fable, or be entirely about the setting (as is often the case with scifi; Lem's "Solaris" is a great example).

Of course, you can still tell completely separate stories set within a single world. Which authors do: Banks with the Culture books, for example, and I rather prefer that form of non-serial storytelling. G. R. R. Martin himself has written spinoffs set in the Westeros world. Gene Wolfe's novels are often set in the same universe.

The second aspect of serial, "long-form" storytelling that everyone enjoys is the continuity; you may have lots of small stories told over the course of several seasons of a TV series, but it's the same, familiar world, and you don't need to be introduced to a completely new setting every time. As someone who greatly enjoys books (though not so much fantasy) but has a huge problem getting past the opening chapter or even the opening page, I completely understand the attraction.

(That said, there's no excuse for bloat. G. R. R. Martin seems to have entered into a kind of narrative tailspin as a result of having plotted himself into several corners. Rather than chopping away at the narrative and making some shortcuts to get the characters in the position he had planned for them to be in, he apparently decided the solution was... more plot. The end product was the long and tedious boat journey that was "A Dance With Dragons".)