November Reading! Share your thoughts...

[blacknorth]

Currently reading Hunger by Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun. Existential in nature, this classic 1890 novel much admired by Thomas Mann revolves around a writer forced to starve due to a lack of funds/sales. In the end starvation almost becomes a part of his sacrifice to his art and he is left with the ultimate decision to die or seek salvation by fleeing his current circumstances.

Now you've got me curious. This sounds remarkably like the story of Thomas Otway, an English playwright who literally starved to death. In a bleak irony he was given a guinea by a gentleman who had recognised him, bought a loaf of bread and died upon eating it.

 

[Taltos]

Finished Asher Polity Agent - very interesting if you take into account the series, gives more background to the existing characters and introduces some new ones. Have to figth urge to read the next book at once.
Now back to Gibson and Angel Stations.

 

[murphy]

Finished up Redick's The Rats and the Ruling Sea. It seemed to drag a bit, but I'm still looking forward to the next book. Now reading Jack McDevitt's The Devil's Eye, another Alex Benedict mystery in the far future.

 

[nomadman]

Am currently reading Dino Buzzati's Restless Nights, a collection of the Italian fantasist's short stories. Very much enjoying it so far. Buzzati's writing has echoes of Borges with its lean precision and wordchoice, though his imagination is more playful, more surreal. Some of the stories are outright zany, others are quite clearly parables. Many are brilliant. The Falling Girl is a beautiful meditation on life and youth. The Bewitched Jacket is a Faustian tale of greed and death. In The Seven Messengers and The Walls of Anagoor, Buzzati recalls some of the melancholy and desperate longing that characterized his famous novel The Tartar Steppe. In the former, a prince attempts to map out the extent of his father's kingdom, and finds out too late that it may have no end; in the latter a man seeking a hidden and fabulous city deep in the heart of Tibet finds himself waiting patiently for the great gates to open and admit him to paradise... There's also the true story of the Eiffel Tower, which originally reached to heaven, and the horrific 'Elephantiasis' of plastic, with its tumorous swellings, writhings and crushings. Am about 2/3 of the way through the book at the moment. Hoping more gems await...

On Hamsun, try his novel Mysteries. It's his masterpiece, I think (though Growth of the Soil is probably his most famous work). His short stories are also worth looking into, very bleak and strange, emotionally powerful and compelling. They can be found in Tales of Love and Loss.

 

[GOLLUM]

On Hamsun, try his novel Mysteries. It's his masterpiece, I think (though Growth of the Soil is probably his most famous work). His short stories are also worth looking into, very bleak and strange, emotionally powerful and compelling. They can be found in Tales of Love and Loss.

Growth of the Soil didn't grab me but Mysteries I wasn't aware of.

Mysteries I see is available in a Penguin edition, so I may track that down.

Thanks...

 

[Fried Egg]

I've just finished "Well of the Unicorn" by Fletcher Pratt. Here's my review:

I overcame my dislike of the cover of this book, that I would never have picked up had it not been part of the fantasy masterworks series. Although it does depict a scene in the story, thankfully it is quite out of context and doesn't really give you any idea as to what to expect within.

And what we have is one man's story of his rise to prominance within the revolutionary movement attempting to throw off the reign of the oppressive Vulkings. In addition to his travels and fighting from one end of the continent to the other (and back again), we follow his deliberations and moral dilemas as to what is the ideal form of rulership. What is he trying to replace the current regime with and is it really any better? Is freedom paramount and to what extent must it be sacrificed for security and safety from aggressive neighbours?

In addition we follow his personal trials and tribulations. To what extent is he in charge of his own destiny or a pawn of the mysterious sorcerer who seems to forsee his future and seeks to help his rise? He seems unlucky in love as well as we follow his awkward encounters with the women he meets (and invariably falls in love with) on the way.

All in all it is an epic story set in a complex world, of a simple man attempting to come to terms with the complexities of reality. In addition the archaic, antiquated prose (stylised to excess) serves as a barrier to engaging with the story but not unmanagable once you get used to it.

A worthy entry in the Masterworks series although it won't be to everyone's taste.

Now onto "The Deep Beyond" by C.J. Cherryh...

 

[Hilarious Joke]

Sounds interesting, Fried Egg!

I just finished The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers. It was terrific. I always hesitate to call Moers' books "kids' books" because doing so seems grossly unfair - they are bursting out of their seams with imagination, wit, excitement, adventure, and epic-ness, so much so that I would hate their audience to be restricted to just children. I'm quite sad now that I seem to have read all the Moers' books I can find at this point.

Anyway now I'm reading three books:
- The Crooked Letter by Sean Williams;
- Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson; and
- The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson.

 

[j d worthington]

A good review, overall, F.E. Something else I'd add is his struggle to come to the mature realization that "easy answers" (magic, sorcery) are invariably less humane than the complex, often messy sorts of long-range, often personally unrewarded efforts to change things. One sees this in especially sharp focus with his effort to cast a "love spell" on a young woman he "loves", only to find that what he has brought about is a supernatural form of rape -- and having to live with the guilt and shame of that fact.

As an historian, Pratt was well aware that what often seem pragmatic, simple solutions only tend to damage and destruction in the long run; that no question involving large human interaction can ever have such a resolution, but must be resolved (if ever) slowly, and through trial and error, with compromises and an attempt to be as moral as the situation will allow. It's a complex book, and a very rich one, which grows with rereadings.

And, for those interested in such points, the world in which it is set is based upon that in one of Lord Dunsany's plays: "King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior", which can be found in his collection, Five Plays....

 

[Connavar]

Its based on a Lord Dunsany play hehe thats something !!

If i didnt already know the book from fantasy Masterworks i would wonder about it for the Dunsany connection.

Speaking about Lord Dunsany i just finished The Collected Jorkens vol.1.
It was full of wonderful,bizarre,sad,thought-provoking,funny stories. I enjoyed it so much because most of the stories was written with a new voice of Dunsany compared to his famous early fantasy stories with the poetic prose.

Now i'm reading another collection called The Big Knockover by Dashiell Hammett. Prose style wise going from Dunsany's slow prose whose stories have to be read very slow to Hammett's lean,spare,very direct writing is a comical contrast

 

[HoopyFrood]

A selection of books at the moment:

Spiritualism and Society - Geoffrey K. Nelson (1969), mostly for its first chapter.
Spook Crooks! - J. J. Proskauer (1928), kinda relates to something I'm doing, but just looked liked an interesting read anyway.
The Haunted Homes and Family Legends of Great Britain - John Ingram (1886), looking for a bit of inspiration, but I also do just like reading ghost stories, especially real ones.

 

[j d worthington]

There are times when I am a bit reluctant to post what I'm currently reading, as it is so far removed from sff that I rather feel people are going to be scratching their heads asking "what the heck is that doing here?" I currently seem to be in that position. Not only am I reading something over 3000 pages of Poe, but I am also currently reading some of the writings of Edith Miniter -- an amateur journalist colleague of Lovecraft, and a worthy writer in her own right -- and her mother, Jennie E. T. Dowe. Writings by the latter are not that easy to come by, but I have a few things by Mrs. Miniter, and her abilities are quite evident early on -- as is her wonderfully dry sense of humor. It is a pity her work has seen so little attention, but now there is at least one collection currently in print, as well as her novel, Our Natupski Neighbors (which, as I understand, garnered some very positive critical reviews when it was originally published), and it is rather nice that, more than seventy years after her death, she is still remembered, and read by at least a few....

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

There are times when I am a bit reluctant to post what I'm currently reading, as it is so far removed from sff that I rather feel people are going to be scratching their heads asking "what the heck is that doing here?"

That's one of the things that keeps threads like this interesting, so don't stop. (Of course that's also one of the reasons I more or less stopped posting here, but that's a different story.)

 

[GOLLUM]

I think it's important we don't just focus on SFF here. Yes it's the mainstay of these forums but there's plenty of other excellent authors worthy of ones attention, hence my ever growing interest in world literature both on a contemporary and historical scale. Of course, I have to admit that many of these authors have some fantastic element to their writing but not all.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Yes, it's interesting how both our definitions of fantasy (or at least our rating of favourite fantastic authors) has changed in the light of broader reading.

Right now though, I'm not reading anything very literary but instead a new addition to a classic pulp series, THE TERROR OF FU MANCHU by William Patrick Maynard.

 

[Connavar]

I wont be reading much SFF in coming months, i neglected too many fav authors of any kind. I will spend my time in corrupt,amoral world of Hammett,Jim Thompson in next week or so.

Next month i will spend on classic lit, since i got 1000+ of Count of Monte Cristo,Star Rover by Jack Landon.

Sometimes you want the realness of non SFF stories and other type of stories

 

[Fried Egg]

I read predominately SF, Fantasy and Horror. I do have a few non-fiction books on the go/in the pipeline, but when it comes to fiction, I rarely stray outside of these genres. Limiting? Perhaps although I do not seem to lack for great books to read even within these narrow confines. There's just too damn much I desperately want to read without taking time out and experimenting in fields I know little about.

Missing out I may be but one has only so much time and one is missing out whatever one chooses to read because something is foregone with every choice we make.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I seem to have fallen into a pattern of a lot of genre fiction for a few years at a time (my earlier involvement with these forums was at the height of that phase) followed by some years of forays into other things. There's a lot of overlap of course and there's ever a time when I'm reading purely within or without genre confines. The thing is, for all the fantastic things that genre authors can achieve, I can't bear to miss out on exploring the classical canon (at my own pace) or discovering some of the greats of lit'ry fiction like Thomas Mann, Javier Marias or WG Sebald. On the other hand, I can't carry on simply reading classics and Nobel fodder and forgoing discovering the next Adam Roberts or China Mieville, or my continuing foray with the older genre material. Oh and then there are comics! You get the idea...

Connavar: I've recently developed a taste for noir - mainly Hammett and Chandler. What's a good Thompson work to start with?

 

[j d worthington]

Well, to be honest, the connection is there (for me, at any rate), as it is related to my studies concerning Lovecraft. J. E. T. D. and her daughter Edith Miniter were, as stated, amateur colleagues of the Old Gent and, when Jennie died in 1919, HPL wrote a verse tribute to her, one which comes across as much less formal and more genuine than much of his metrical effusions of that sort -- even though, at the time, he only knew some of her writings. As a result of that lack of personal knowledge (among other things) the verse was published under his "Ward Phillips" pseudonym; at a later time, when an opportunity arose to reissue it with his own name appended, he also added a lovely brief note titled "A Singer of Ethereal Moods and Fancies" (which can be found in his Collected Essays, vol. 1).

Mrs. Miniter he came to know much better, meeting her several times, and even staying with her on the trip to the parts of Massachusetts (Wilbraham, etc.) which resulted in the scenery for "The Dunwich Horror". She and her relative, Evenor Beebe, were the ones who provided the bit of genuine lore about whippoorwills being psychopomps, used to such wonderful effect in that tale. She also wrote the first parody of Lovecraft's fiction, "Falco Ossifracus", poking fun at "The Statement of Randolph Carter" as well as HPL's style in general (all with quite genial humor), and also wrote various pieces about (or, in some cases, containing information about) Lovecraft as well, which provide some of the more unusual views of the man (such as his participation at and enjoyment of an amusement park outing), displaying his warmth and humor. He also wrote a tribute to her upon her death, and carried out the somewhat melancholy task (which she had not been able to complete in her lifetime) of fulfilling her mother's wishes and spreading Jennie's ashes over her chosen spots.

But the bulk of their writings were of quite a different nature, yet both eloquent and charming (quite a bit of J. E. T. D.'s writing was published in Scribner's and The Century, for instance); and I'm glad to see it made once more available, as it is well worth perusing.

(As a side note, if I am reading the notation correctly on the flyleaf of the edition of Mrs. Miniter's collection Going Home which I have, this was, at one time, the copy owned by Sam Moskowitz. Given my sadness at the fact that his collection -- quite an immense and valuable one -- had to be split up as no institution would take it as a holding, despite its immense historical value concerning American popular literature, that fact gives me some very ambivalent feelings. It reminds me of that, of course, but it is also rather nice having something of his in my collection, as well....)

 

[Connavar]

I seem to have fallen into a pattern of a lot of genre fiction for a few years at a time (my earlier involvement with these forums was at the height of that phase) followed by some years of forays into other things. There's a lot of overlap of course and there's ever a time when I'm reading purely within or without genre confines. The thing is, for all the fantastic things that genre authors can achieve, I can't bear to miss out on exploring the classical canon (at my own pace) or discovering some of the greats of lit'ry fiction like Thomas Mann, Javier Marias or WG Sebald. On the other hand, I can't carry on simply reading classics and Nobel fodder and forgoing discovering the next Adam Roberts or China Mieville, or my continuing foray with the older genre material. Oh and then there are comics! You get the idea...

Connavar: I've recently developed a taste for noir - mainly Hammett and Chandler. What's a good Thompson work to start with?

Hammett made me love reading Noir, he is a master prose stylist and a true literary giant. His better short stories are among the best works in the format i have read. He deserve his rep as a mainstream Great American writer of the last century. Reading his work i lament the fact his career was only 12 years long.


Jim Thompson most classic book is The Killer Inside Me, dont read the synopsis before you read it. It will give away the twist of the book. Its better to wonder what the title is saying.

Look into Richard Stark book The Hunter. A classic Noir series from the 60s with a criminal that is a cult figure in the field. Stark is a pen-name of Donald E Westlake, a Grandmaster of Mystery writers of America. His early books got recently reprinted you might get them from the library or buy the cheap paperbacks.

I rate that series as highly as Hammett works.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Thanks for the pointers, Connavar.

JD: It's interesting the things you find in second-hand bookstores. It's always bittersweet to find a book that was lovingly inscribed to someone and wonder where those people are now and how this once-treasured gift wound up for sale. Sometimes I've picked up portions of collections that once belonged to a certain person - I have upwards of 30 books that belonged to one P. Thomas Chandy ,a fascinating collection with an emphasis on Eastern European and between-the-world-wars British literature and about half as many that belonged to a Diwakaran who seems to have been an academic and a theatre personality. Both these men had extensive and often unusual collections and it seems a shame that neither a library of some kind nor their family thought to preserve their collections. I also have a copy of Christopher Priest's A DREAM OF WESSEX that once belonged to the Indian SF/F writer Ashok Banker!