I have to remind myself too often that I'm not as cute as I used to be and when guys are being nice and friendly it doesn't mean there's any attraction or anything more to it than nice and friendly. But one day I hope to be wrong.
Today I saw a post from a guy equating women refusing to date smokers (he is one) as the same as refusing to date fat people, hippies, vegetarians, or bimbos. None of those other traits directly affects other people like smoking does. Ridiculous to compare them and everyone has the right to weed out whatever they feel is undesirable.
Another post today was complaining about materialistic women only willing to date men with higher education degrees. He never made any reference to those women actually wanting someone who made a lot of money, just that they have a degree. Sure a degree may give you higher earning potential but it's certainly not guaranteed. And a materialistic woman would probably latch on to anyone making lots of money whether he had a degree or not. He ended his rant with some religious nonsense about how a degree wouldn't help a man's soul.
There was something else but I forgot...
P.S. I'm annoyed when people have various thoughts and post separate entries for each, one after the other. It's not so hard to make one post now is it?
Personally, I think Murakami is horribly over-rated, but he's a current literary darling, so Kafka on the Shore or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World might be worth a look.
One big recommendation: China Miéville is the most thrilling voice to hit fantasy in years and years. Brilliant stylist; his prose easily equals Chip Delany or Ursula Le Guin, surpasses (imho) George Martin or Gene Wolfe.
But not for everyone. Not Tolkienesque elves & hobbits, no kinda-like-rural Englands, no monolithic all-bad Dark Lords. You're more likely to find characters derived from Egyptian myth (like the Khepri--a race of artists with human bodies and the heads of scarabs), Hindu epics, even a version of the cactuars from Final Fantasy video games.
The core setting of his best known novels-- Perdido Street Station; The Iron Council; The Scar--is the immense, relentlessly magical city of New Crobuzon. This is a steampunk world--more intense than, but similar to, the setting of Fullmetal Alchemist.
And Miéville's very political. His paradigm (again, like Fullmetal) is that magic will inevitably be co-opted by oligarchs, militarized, and used against the masses; while artists, scientists & outlaws invent new magics to fight back.
Result: in New Crobuzon, class warfare is at once wondrous, gorgeous, psychedelic, and dripping with eldritch horror...
Bottom line: if you like Moorcock, Tim Powers, Thomas Disch, M. John Harrison, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael de Larrabeiti, Emma Bull, or Kelly Link, you might love Miéville. commented on Mar 21
This will seem odd at first, for Lady Dorothy Dunnett didn't write sf/f. She wrote a hugely epic and epically romantic historical series: the six-volume Lymond Chronicles and an eight-volume prequel, The House of Niccolò
This isn't a personal recommendation: I could never get into them. But that's true of much romance.
What I can say is this: every female fantasy author and editor whom I've known even slightly has been absolutely madly in love with Dunnett's novels. Given that her hardcore fans have included writers like Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffrey, it's likely that Dunnett may be (directly or by one degree of separation) the single greatest influence on romantic fantasy in the past half century. For that reason alone... commented on Mar 21