Just finished Cloud Atlas, which left me a little cold. The individual stories are pretty forgettable and their interplay never really comes to much. The only one I enjoyed throughout was the story of Robert Frobisher in Belgium (surprisingly). The rest were a hodgepodge of tropes, bad accents and worse dialect. )-:
Next up is Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye and maybe after that i’ll dive into some more Octavia Butler. I’ve been thinking about Kindred a lot recently
Oh man, Butler is so good. Have you read anything else by her outside of Kindred? I am a huge fan of Xenogenesis/Lilith’s Brood.
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison. It’s a collection of the three Stainless Steel Rat stories, from late 50s, early + late 70s.
The first is a mishmash of space noir crime courtly drama bank job secret agent gizmos. The last is weirdly prescient on some cyberpunk tech (monofilaments mostly) but still plenty of the gee-whiz, “I was marooned on a primitive planet so I had to make my own super-effective sleep gas bombs and jetpack” E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith sci-fi.
There’s quite a lot of female characters who beat a lot of people up, but they inevitably get captured and need rescuing and using their feminine wiles and generally allowing enough sexism to be present to really show how much the stories are a product of their times.
I ran out of ‘good’ sci fi so now it’s time for 90s Shadowrun novelisations.
I can’t decide what to read next I may need a break from 19th century white dudes for a while I’ve been sort of immersed in that for the past year
I kind of bounced off all the sexual violence in Dawn but I might refresh myself on it and move on to book 2. Very much in the mood for body horror rn
n e way, The Bluest Eye is real, real good. And so is Beloved, so far. The way Morrison writes about memory as story, as bodily trauma and as fabric and bone is incredible
Hi, I’m reading The Story of O. Ok bye thx
I’m not far into it yet so maybe I’ll have something to say later
I finished The Night Clock by Paul Meloy the other night. It’s not one I’d really recommend, though it had potential.
A guy I work with who always gives me quality book recommendations suggested Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, so now I am reading that. I like it so far.
Next, I plan to read some more of the Gene Wolfe books that I have not read yet. I also always have a bunch of non-fiction books that I am slowly making my way through.
in between reading other things, I’ve also been perusing some of the HP Lovecraft-Clark Ashton Smith correspondence.
And now let me thank you most profoundly & eloquently in advance for those bits of dinosaur bone which you mention as being tentatively en route! Nothing could be more appropriate to my tastes or more stimulative to my fancy! To think of having by me the mortal remains—in part—of a twenty-foot-high thing which lumbered about the primal Pacific morasses 50,000,000 years ago … a thing which may have trod the vari-colour’d sands of Lemuria, & nosed amongst the fallen obelisks of the Elder Ones…a beast on whose broad back Great Cthulhu himself may have ridden from his palace in blasphemou R’Iyeh! …
I’m tickled by the idea that Lovecraft was enthused by the prospect of lovecraft monsters riding dinosaurs around primordial earth.
Trying to catch up on some of them comic books, but the sheer abundance in every category year on year is completely forbidding
I tried Nameless just now and it was merely okay
I thought some of the art/scenes were pretty good
Though I don’t generally read creepy things so maybe I’m just a sucker
since i am spending about two hours a day going to and from school, i decided to fill those spaces with as many productive activies as i can. that means i’m reading way more than usual!
reading inside a whobbling bus turned out to be way easier than i previously thought, which is great. last month i read a handful of conan the cimmerian stories because of the recommendation in the ic podcast, a few essays from a david foster wallace book, gogol’s “st. john’s eve” and “how the two ivans quarrelled”.
i also read nathaniel hawthorne’s “the scarlet letter”. it’s so good.
This was a terrible mistake. They are mostly thinly-disguised retellings of RPG campaigns, full of ‘he punched him in the brain’ and ‘the corpse(s) hit the floor’. Although there’s more mention of drones than I remembered, and one of the books would have a passable plot & characterisations (barring the embarrassing full-page illustrations every 20 pages).
I tried reading The Little Edges, a collection of Fred Moten’s poetry, but i bounced right off.
So I read Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild (which, btw, is free on kindle, get on it. It’s real cool! Probably the only nebula and hugo award winning mpreg story.
Now i’m reading some of Thomas Ligotti’s short stories. I’m enjoying the bleakness. It’s existential in a similar way to some of Lovecraft’s stuff, minus the eldritch horror (so far, at least). I’d like to read more weird horror but don’t really know where to go beyond Lovecraft.
weird horror: you can basically go to the people lovecraft was cribbing from and people lovecraft knew, so
Arthur Machen
William Hope Hodgson
Clark Ashton Smith
Robert W Chambers
Algernon Blackwood
i am particularly fond of the body-horror stories by kobo abe (“the face of another” comes imediately in mind). maybe that’ll be interesting for you!
yeah i second this; have to check out the rest of these names though.
At times I find myself unimpressed with his stories while reading them. Especially when I read several back-to-back and they kind of run together. But I always find myself thinking about them later.
His non-fiction book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race is one of my favorite books, but it’s not one that I ever get to talk about or recommend to anyone. I find his enthusiastic pessimism somehow charming.
I think I’m experiencing some very diminishing returns from contemporary fantasy, these days. I’m reading Ken Liu’s Grace of Kings and the whole quasi-Asian/Polynesian world it has built up and its pantheon of gods are leaving me sort of cold. Some of the characters are likeable but none of it is really doing that much for me. It’s a long ass book, too, sheesh.
contemporary fantasy is in a bad space right now, imo.
It’s very self congratulatory about how great it is even though it basically falls short of every single classic work of the genre so it ends up feeling stagnant.
Grace of Kings is both vastly improved and kind of cheapened by realizing how much the whole plot is lifted wholesale from Chinese history
I had a lot of fun reading it, but it was more in a “I see what u did there” kind of way, I don’t know that it’s actually that great a book. Still interested to see what happens in the sequel, as in will he keep sticking closely to Han dynasty history (if so: it is going to get very fucked up very fast) or is he going to spin off and do his own thing.
edit: Right, the gods were my least favorite part of the book too. It is one of the worldbuilding/character things that doesn’t have a clear counterpart in Chinese history, but rather than being innovative it just seems kind of derivative of other fantasy tropes. The actual historiography (which, as with most premodern historiography, is more like storytelling or at least… legend making) is pretty concerned with the idea that otherworldly (or at least non human) forces can take sides in history, but it isn’t really portrayed as a sort of greek-feeling chess game where very human gods manipulate human players to settle their disputes. Instead, fate is kind of all-encompassing and incomprehensible to the players/characters, but eminently perceivable to readers. I can see how this wouldn’t really work in a modern novel (Heaven abandons the warlord who behaves irresponsibly and unjustly to his fellow men, while that abandonment is inconceivable in the worldview of the warlord, it is pretty standard moralizing to the audience) I still feel like you could do more with the basic concept of the incomprehensibility and inevitability of fate than boiling it all down to a pantheon of feuding gods.
You must have made this up, no Lovecraft inspirer could have a name this perfect.
