Thanks for the reminder! I'd forgotten that my ideas about that question had already brewed enough to have some idea what an answer might look like.

What do your ideas brew in?

A brain.

How normal of you

you mean your ideas don't brew in the eldritch Pit of Misery that opens once every few days inside your house

from which the Elder God demands sacrifice

i figured everyone had a Pit

I don't have a Pit... does it appear when you get your own place?

probably, mine just showed up one day

it gives nice ideas but it also demands tributes of blood and wine, so it has a downside

but it does improve the property value

this is why my mom buys wine, obviously

I don't have a Pit, but I can use the power of the Flame and the Void.

Ah, so you have the Deluxe Package, Rand

Is this a reference to WoT?

Yup.

it's a great series, i have to find time to read it again

haven't read since i was younger

would i be excommunicated if i said i never read it

@bobble You wouldn't even be balefired.

yes

we banish you from this chatroom

when I read "balefire" I think of OUaT, but I think it's spelled differently there

yep, "Baelfire"

makes me think of Brisingr from Eragon :p

Oh gods, Eragon

I'm not sure I would've finished if not for dragons and a friend who loved the series

would you excommunicate me if i said those were like my favorite books as little-kid-mick

even though nowadays i recognize they were horribly flawed :p

no, but I'd point you to Mythcreants' funny takedown of the first chapter (actually the prologue, but anyways): mythcreants.com/blog/…

@bobble Wheel of Time is one of the doorstoppers I really would like to at least start to read, because from the descriptions it sounds like one of those sci-fi books that I'd like. But the originals don't seem to be available from libraries; I'm not reading the translations; and I rarely want to pay for expensive books shipped from abroad.

@b_jonas cough not sci-fi, fantasy, dammit

It counts as fantasy? Ok, make that fantasy.

there's magic

magic = fantasy

Well, a few hints here and there could potentially be classified as sci-fi. Hell, it's actually post-apocalyptic if you want to get really technical. But basically it's fantasy like LotR etc.

@bobble I'd love to see you classify the Artemis Fowl series :-)

And if I want to pay for expensive books that I might not want to keep and so would rather have from a library, it will be Terry Pratchett books before Wheel of Time.

@Randal'Thor my sister tells me that I wouldn't like the series, though I can't remember what reason she gave

Something about the main character being a jerk

@bobble My brother used to be very useful for movie recommendations, he understood my taste well, but that was back before he had three toddlers to take care of.

@bobble I have mixed feelings on that series. It's a mashup of blatant ripoffs of other things, but with a few shining gems of (possible?) originality that I really liked, and very compelling characters and relationships.

@Randal'Thor Do you think I'd like the Mistborn series more?

I don't know which one to start with, if any. The situation about books accessible is probably the same.

I love the first trilogy of Mistborn, for what it's worth

I have The Hero of Ages piled among some other books on my desk

@b_jonas I don't know your taste well enough to say.

I will say that the writing style of Mistborn (and Sanderson in general, although I'm told he's improved over time) is really grating once you start noticing the words he constantly repeats, the unnatural stilted way many character interactions are described, and his inability to "show not tell". On the other hand, his technical worldbuilding skills and overall plot arcs are fantastic, with twists and turns that keep you guessing until the very end.

I actually prefer telling - in books, as in life, I am bad at picking up implied meaning.

If you like super well-constructed magic systems, so much so that it feels like science more than magic, Sanderson's your man. He's basically got a periodic table except it's for different types of magic rather than chemical elements.

In moderation, of course. But I'm further on the "tell" side of the scale than the general populace

Sanderson's a bloody genius

Sanderson is a hack.

Sue me.

I recommend his YouTube course on worldbuilding to basically everyone I know.

a hack? you don't like him?

My opinion of Sanderson and his writing is ... complicated, see above.

Admittedly I first heard of him as the guy who was going to finish my favourite book series after its original author died, so that set a pretty high bar for him in my mind.

ah. that's fair i guess. i have a liking for him

even if the writing style isn't always brilliant, he has a great knack for worldbuilding and characters that i find an appreciation for.

As I say, worldbuilding and plot arcs - brilliant; writing style on a sentence-by-sentence level - crap.

all fantasy writers suffer from a bit of hack-syndrome, though, so i feel ya.

@Randal'Thor Yeah, that's what I thought too. My brother is probably the only one who does know my taste enough to rely on. (I can also rely on my grandmother in that I avoid anything that she recommends, but that is very low specificity.)

He needs to hire a ghostwriter so that he can design the plots and let someone else churn out the pages.

But he's a pretty good churner himself already.

The joke about Sanderson having used a Hemalurgic spike on George R.R. Martin to steal writing speed is hilarious for those who know both the Mistborn universe and anything about aSoIaF fandom.

now i feel bad that all the fantasy writers i like would probably qualify as hacks here

Hmm... I don't know. Writing style matters a lot when I read a book, but the worldbuilding does too. So it's hard to tell if I'll like these.

(That sounds like I should just re-read Stanisław Lem forever, but I want to read new books too.)

One thing that's lost on me is imagery - some authors are quite good at describing gorgeous settings but I'm unable to imagine them at all.

aphantasia?

@bobble Wait, which book is that about? That sounds like a good recommendation. I read Jules Verne for his imaginary of painting the background.

Just in general, I can't remember a specific book right now

@bobble But which series or author?

I can't remember a series or author either

Mistborn or Wheel of Time?

Huh.

Oh, so it wasn't anything specific.

@Sciborg I know someone who calls Robert Jordan a hack. We always have a friendly argument whenever his name comes up in a discussion :-)

But if I get bored out of my mind with a beautiful description, I'll tell you

@b_jonas Have you read Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy?

@Randal'Thor i just worry that if i start sharing books i like here it'll be "oh god that author is a total hack/writing style is terrible/why do you like it" :p

I haven't read WoT and I can't remember Mistborn's descriptions (or any descriptions. see above problem)

@Randal'Thor No.

@b_jonas Among Mistborn and WoT, I'd say WoT has more descriptive imagery.

Ok. Though that's not enough alone of course.

But my guess is still that I should start reading Wheel of Time.

@b_jonas If you like descriptive imagery of places, I recommend it. Somehow he has a knack for even naming imaginary places so that they sound like exactly what they are: the forest of Tantrevalles, the mountains of Teach tac Teach, the castle of Tintzin Fyral, ...

I am reading an RPG webcomic series at the moment

And I should continue with Witcher when I get to.

@bobble Which one?

There are a lot of those.

@Sciborg Oh no, feel free to share anything! We don't put people down for their literary tastes here (it's even a policy). Sorry for my "Sanderson is a hack" comment - I have some issues with his writing style myself, but no issues with anyone else liking it or being his fan.

ah, I was just noting my current reading material since we're discussing reading

no worries <3

specifically The Order of the Stick

someone in the high 300s now

I remember TOotS from a while back, is it ongoing or did it reach a stopping point?

still going

@Sciborg It's ongoing. It's in the seventh and last book, which might be the longest.

Awesome, I'll have to catch up on it.

It was somewhere in the fourth book when I started to read it.

no spoilers or i will burn you with fire

I mean when I started to seriously read it. I'm pretty sure I've seen a few comics before the start of the fourth book, but I didn't get into it seriously.

My favorite comic was the one where they made a whole joke about how they couldn't use mind flayers because the monster was technically the intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast

so lawyers appeared and had to drag it away

@bobble I didn't intend to spoil, but now I'm tempted to call your bluff, because I don't think you have fire attack spells prepared.

You might just whack me with a sword instead though, so it's probably not worth.

I have Druidcraft to skunk you

And it's a cantrip, always prepared

@Sciborg giantitp.com/comics/oots0032.html . That was early. OotS got better since, it has an actual story now.

Yeah. I keep hearing it gets really good the further you go

Unrelated to this, my new question mythology.stackexchange.com/q/7880/197 is definitely on topic, but the style how I asked it might be too much. If you wish, take a look at it and tell me if I should dial it back (or just edit it if you prefer).

that's mythology stack

@Sciborg Unclear. I think the fourth and fifth books are better than the sixth. But it is still quite good at least.

@bobble Yes, I know.

Sci Fi and Mythology needs more posts rather than Lit stealing all their questions, and besides, it's fine art, not literature, so it might actually be off-topic here, based on how the mosaic thing was judged off topic.

@bobble Are you ripping someone's cant, or having a trip with a can?

no, I can't rip anything

@b_jonas Given that SFF gets about 4 times as many questions per day as Lit (excluding the occasional 95-question flood here), I wouldn't say Lit is stealing too many questions from SFF :-)

@Randal'Thor Wait, I actually have proof now.

But yes, SFF is big enough so it's not affected as severely as Mythology.

@Randal'Thor Yes, the tag part is irrelevant.

What's more relevant is that more people who can answer will see my story-id or sci-fi book questions on Sci Fi.

but I would presumably have added the author tag, because I'd have looked at my other questions about the same book for how they're tagged and scifi.stackexchange.com/… they all have that tag.

People on SFF will edit out author tags according to site policy, whereas on Lit everything has an author tag.

But you're right, SFF is more likely to have sci-fi book experts specifically.

Even more true for story-id experts I think.

Lots of the story-ID gurus are found on both sites, though: Sean Duggan = FuzzyBoots is a high-rep user here too, and user14111 and Ayshe. Quassnoi is an excellent ID answerer on Lit who's not on SFF.

I see.

And Rand answered my one ID question here pretty quickly!

And Quassnoi answered mine, but that story doesn't count as sci-fi or fantasy so it would have been off-topic. I rarely ask story-id questions though.

I only have four on Sci Fi, one on Lit, and I recall one outside of SE. And I'm continuously amazed how many story-id questions FuzzyBoots manages to ask. scifi.stackexchange.com/…

i gave in and wrote my first Lit answer because North's Imagine Dragons question was calling me

@b_jonas Top asker and top answerer by volume. Many self-answer pairs too. I guess it means he has a patchy memory :-)

I can sort of understand the top story-id answerers. I understand how some people have read a lot of stories, much more than me, and they often talk about their search skills how they manage to find stories they'd never heard of on the web.

It's respectable and amazing, but not weird.

@Sciborg Gooood, gooood. Let the Lit flow through you.

Asking a lot of story-id questions is what I don't understand.

What's your threshold for "a lot"?

@bobble FuzzyBoots has asked 239 ID questions on SFF.