Ebook Bargains

For anyone with some interest in Clojure, Scala, Haskell, or Rust there is a decent humble bundle right now. Not sure why Blandy’s Rust book got thrown in since the bundle theme is functional programming but nice of them to include it. Living Clojure is a decent intro to the language.

I haven’t heard of any of the books or authors in the new Humble SF & Fantasy Bundle.

At first I was thinking, hey, angry robots sounds like a great theme!

But then I realized that’s the name of the publisher.

If you want the first book in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, Eye of the World, its this month’s Tor.com’s eBook of the Month Club free e-book.

ps: The book club is free to join, just submit your email and country of origin.

Have they had free ebooks the last few months? I stopped getting emails from them in around June 2017, so I thought they’d stopped. Thanks for the heads up.

EDIT: Same as rshetts, my account was no longer valid. I had to sign up again. Easy enough to do.

Last email I have from the club was in July, some book called Kushiel’s Dart that I never downloaded.

They took a 6 month break.

Angry Robot is pretty good at picking out solid F&SF writers. Not super highbrow stuff generally but fun.

Cool, didn’t know Tor was doing that. I already have Eye of the World, but look forward to seeing what future titles they give away.

And, Wheel of Time TV series? That should be interesting.

I think there was a problem there with the Tor ebook club. It had been awhile between books and when followed up on this email notice, somehow my account was no longer valid and I had to sign up again. So those of you who haven’t checked lately may want to verify their accounts by signing in. Your account may have been lost.

Is that a ‘must read’ book? I’ve heard of it and the author, but never read him.

The Wheel of Time was hugely popular back in the day—the GoT of the early '90s. By the 6th or 7th book in the series, though, Jordan was writing doorstops that didn’t go anywhere, and then he died.

I understand the series’ conclusion, written by Brandon Sanderson, was pretty well-received. The whole shebang runs to around 12K pages, if you have some time to kill.

Well, there’s like 15 books in the series, the original author died before it was complete so Brandon Sanderson wrote the last few based on Jordan’s notes. I enjoyed the first two and just started the third.

I just downloaded the sample to my Kindle. I’ll sign up for the book club if it seems good tonight.

I struggled with Eye of the World. Didn’t make it pass mid point and gave up. The book just failed to capture my attention. I think if I were to read this when I was younger, maybe I’ll be able to survive. Ha ha ha.

I think I gave up around the 4th or 5th book, there was just not enough story progression and too much description of battle planning and braid tugging.

The first book is a pretty standard farmboy saves the world fantasy story. Not bad, but not as interesting. From book two onwards there’s a lot more politics, wars, and other grand scale happening. At least, until book 9 (some people say as early as 7 but I disagree) when momentum pretty much disappears and only one major thing happens, at the very end, to be roundly ignored in book 10, where nothing at all happens. And then things pick back up a little in book 11, and then Jordan died.

I only got a chance to read a little of the sample last night. Not sure I’ll bother. For some reason I didn’t like the style or cadence of the writing. I didn’t really read enough to get a feel for the story though.

Yeah as I recall I made it through the fourth or fifth book before I gave up, and this was back in college in the early 90s before I became thoroughly bored with pretty much all swords and sorcery stuff. I’d never make it five pages today.

I recall some pretty #savage parody takedown’s of Jordan’s writing back in the day. They involved a lot of sniffing and braid-pulling.

I felt that way about the 1st book.