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...comes highly recommended to anyone who loved The Lies of Locke Lamora as much as I did. It's as Byzantine as the first, but includes pirates! poisons! and antiquing.
They're shaping up to be our generation's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, IMO.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Thanks for the recommend. I looked it up on Amazon and it has a high rating -- I think I'll see if the Library here locally has it yet. Are most books by Scott Lynch pretty good?
Posts: 9538 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Farmgirl, you should start with the Lies of Locke Lamora, which is the first in the series, and Lynch's debut. Posts: 5700 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:...comes highly recommended to anyone who loved The Lies of Locke Lamora as much as I did. It's as Byzantine as the first, but includes pirates! poisons! and antiquing.
I just bought The Lies of Locke Lamora! I was cruising the Chapters shelves in search of something new to take to university and I picked this one up and read the first few pages, seemed good- I got a good feeling about it. I had no idea it was so popular. Haven't started reading it, but imagine how pleasant it is to discover that this book comes incredibly highly recommended from Hatrack!
Excellent. Finally, a good buy!
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I just finished The Lies of Locke Lamora and was quite impressed. I'll have to put the next one on order.
I find myself with too many books to read though. I just bought The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton (Britain's No.1 Science Fiction Writer, so says the cover). At a hefty 1200 + pages, it's quite an investment, but a very good read so far.
Once I finish that one, and the equally huge second part, I might be able to get back to Scott Lynch. Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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I love the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, so I'll give The Lies of Locke Lamora a shot. MightyCow, The Reality Dysfunction and the sequels are great, a very ambitious work that fulfills it's promise. Plus it has freaky futuristic sex! nanotech wetware! epic space battles! and ghosts. I might read it for the 3rd time shortly.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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I liked Red seas Under Red Skies and agree with Tom's pitch -- at first I thought the pirates would be silly, but actually, it was a welcome break from the city (and I love city-oriented, urban fantasy novels).
"In the end this is a book that was built to fail. Its narrative structure and intellectual foundations are undermined by the constraints of writing a fantasy serial. There is both too much plot and too little: Lynch spends the book tying what looks like an elaborate knot, but when he pulls the ends tight at the conclusion we find the string is completely straight. It has not so much unravelled as been completely illusory. Flaccid middle volumes are a well known design flaw in fantasy series, but no-one seems to care enough to do anything about it. Presumably because we keep buying them."
I wonder if readers have lost their tolerance for the episodic. I thought that Red Seas nicely moved some of the key plot points along (that is the evolving of Jean and Locke's relationship as well as what each are going to do with the skills and mission they were trained to do). If it had been all heavy moving along the grand narrative, then it wouldn't have been as fun. What's nice about the two novels is that they have the caper element going, but at the same time are building a moral (so-to-speak), epic, developing plot.
Edit to Add: Glibness is one of the complaints to be found in the comments to the review I link to above. I think that some fantasy writers could do with a little more glibness. One example: Robin Hobb's Soldier's Son series is just glum all the time.
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:I wonder if readers have lost their tolerance for the episodic.
We're not used to stories without a metaplot anymore, I guess. But since I prefer stories like that, it's not a problem. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I really enjoyed Red Seas but I admit, I was very disappointed with the last few chapters. It was well worth reading, but at the same time I felt it could have been a lot better at the end.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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