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Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore
I take your point, but the Islamophobes do not define Islam by what muslims actually believe. They define it by what they think Muslims ought to believe based on an extremely skewed reading of a selection of the source texts. When confronted with this discrepancy, the Islamophobes tend to adopt one of two tactics. The more paranoid adopt the stance that all of these moderate (or even liberal!) Muslims are simply being deceptive about what they really believe. The remainder simply dismiss the majority of muslims as having a real commitment to Islam. Ironically, this echoes the views of the jihadists themselves. The greates irony is that groups such as Alqaeda are not throwbacks to the 7th century; they are fundamentally postmodern in methodology and ideology. They do not adhere to the traditional readings of the classical texts but instead deconstruct them to support a militant ideology structured around a few key terms (jihad, tauheed, shirk, etc.).
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I could not agree more. I know several muslims. A few devout, but most are pretty laid back on it. The only one I know that even prays 5 times a day is a recent convert. I know plenty of Jews who eat pork for instance. Anyway. Not sure if the Kratman books are my cup of tea, but since they are free I may give em a shot. But I'm no fan of didactic writing. i don't mind if you have a political point, even one that is extremely opposite my own liberal politics, but if you put it in a fiction book badly and heavy handedly written I get annoyed.
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Originally Posted by Kevin8or
A great example is Terry Goodkind. I loved his first few novels, and although I've not abandoned him, his later novels sometimes seem to be written by someone else. It gets so bad that I sometimes skim ahead a few pages to get on with the actual story.
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I found myself doing the exact same thing the last couple of books. Goodkind is a great example of what I was talking about. Fine, he's a fan of Ayn rand. I get that. But the repetition and didactic writing was getting to the point I did not even care about the main characters anymore and was more interested in the supporting ones.
Basically it comes down to if you can tell your story well.
I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere, but all of Bean's CD material is available online, of course with caveats that they would like you to purchase the books, but here is the link:
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ There are some nice little treasures there, including all the Honor books, the entire Vorkosigan saga, which I already had print copies to except the last couple, and a few Mercedes Lackey books.