May's Marvellously Mysterious Manuscript Meanderings

Status
Not open for further replies.
GOLLUM

GOLLUM

Moderator
Joined
Mar 21, 2005
Messages
9,035
Location
Australia
OK, you know the drill.

What are you all upon to in the reading stakes?

I'm currently making my way through a book that is justifiably regarded as a Legend in the literary firmament. The book is the post-war novel The Leopard, written by the enigmatic Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa. I will write a full reveiw of this work but it would be interesting to know if anyone else here has either read the book or seen the film it was based on?
 
Still going through Sukuzi's collection Dark Water. Short stories all with a water theme. Kind of reminds me of Stephen King's stuff as the protagonist of each is often quite the messed up person with lots of problems of their own (especially thinking of the Hold story here, if anyone's read the collection).

So far Floating Water (the one that was made into the film Dark Water) and Dream Cruise, with a dead boy clinging to the keel of a boat, have been my favourites.
 
Haven't had much time to read lately (spent a few weeks driving to California and back by myself), so I'm still on Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas. It's slow going, but excellent so far. I have trouble not picturing Dantes as the actor from the recent movie though.
 
Im reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ.

Im so confused by the different characters,worlds in this book and i like that. Its also very real,important issues it deals with. I read a similar powerful novel recently that wasnt SF but it also dealt with female issues and it was also written in Sweden in the same year as this novel.
 
Connavar said:
Im reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ.
Click to expand...

I'm interested in this. I've only read (Extra)orinary People, by Russ, and I enjoyed it.

I'm finishing up an autobiography and a memoir:

Tales of Wonder, by Huston Smith
Places Where I've Done Time, by William Saroyan

Both are amazing. I've read the Saroyan before (he's my favorite author of American lit), but I recently purchased a new copy because a dog destroyed my old one. And the Smith book is incredible; talk about a remarkable man. He was friends with Father Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, and Aldous Huxley, dropped acid with Timothy Leary, and knew MLK and D.T. Suzuki. He also practiced Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, all while remaining a Christian, and became the father of comparative religious studies in the West. Amazing.
 
Right now I'm reading "The Shakespear secret" by Jennifer Lee Carrell. Not bad, but not too great either. But it gets the job done. So to say.
 
The Business by Iain Banks ... which may be a bit stylistically inspired by Douglas Coupland; which would explain why there doesn't appear to be any danger of a plot developing. Still readable as a kind of travelogue with occasional incidents.
 
I'm reading Beyond the Shadows, the final part of Brent Weeks' Night Angel Trilogy.

I'm also playing the Kindle I bought recently, and using it for reading through the first draft of my story. Oh, and I'm partway through Edward Gibbon's excellent The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
 
I think I found the mystery in Shakespear Secret, and it was pretty disappointing, to say the least. So I dropped it and startet Nightmare on Elm Street: Suffer the children instead. Right before bedtime. Oooooohh... :D
 
thaddeus6th said:
Oh, and I'm partway through Edward Gibbon's excellent The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Click to expand...

Wonderful work. I've read it one and a half times - an abridgment from a great-aunt led me to get the whole thing. (And I usually hate both long works and abridgments - go figure.)

For my current reading, I recently found a copy of The Cobra Trilogy by Tim Zahn. I read the first two of the series mumblety-mumble years ago near the "golden age of science of fiction" and then lost track of them. I've just re-read Cobra and, while this book could be criticized in a multitude of ways and I naturally didn't find the super-warriors as 'gosh wow neat!' as on the first reading, I still actually zipped through the book with enjoyment (somewhat to my surprise). Maybe it's an overreaction to suffering through the 700 pages that narrated about four days in the life of a villain in a dreary decadent megalopolis of bored immortals with nanotech oozing everywhere (Reynolds' Chasm City) - it was nice to read a book which took 291 pages to cover the 29 prime years (c.20-50) of Our Hero defending and helping to colonize frontier worlds for normal humans. (Yeah, so he might be described as the undemocratic servo-enhanced muscle (only twice the votes is quite a concession for being hundreds of times more powerful) for a mostly-benevolently totalitarian oligarchy - his heart's in the right place. ;) )

Lots of Heinlein and Anderson and Dickson vibes to this one. And the structure is interesting. This is one of the things it'd be easy to criticize, but I sort of liked it: it's more a sequence of 6 novelettes/novellas than a novel, in that - like a sequence of Cobra recon jumps - it focuses on half a dozen separate key sequences in the life of Our Hero, the course of The War, and the little personal and sociological lessons that go with. (However, none of the sequences seems quite sufficient to truly stand alone.) I was also surprised at how well I remembered it - prior to reading, I couldn't have said anything about it beyond 'war of aliens vs. soldiers with implanted lasers and servos' (another thing easy to criticize - ain't nobody ever going to be built that way - and, if they were, ain't no aliens ever going to be unable to easily detect it) but, as I read it, the fates or key moments of various characters and the overall shape of things would pop into my head shortly before actually coming to them in the text. Neat.

Anyway - on with Cobra Strike. :)
 
The Places Where I've Done Time, by William Saroyan

Turned off tonight's episode of The Military Theater before the main actor could perform his monologue to do something that actually matters - read, and finish, a damn good book. Some things never change. We've killed one head, and seven more will rise in power. There will be more violence; there will be retaliation. More will die. But there are good things that never change, things like a good painting, or piece of music, or book. Returning to this wonderful collection of 68 short, anecdotal stories has reminded me of this.

But I too have changed since the last time I read Saroyan's thought-provoking, funny, tragic, sorrowful, and humorous autobiography-of-sorts. I've grown into a man, and thus I appreciate the man Saroyan was even more. His triumphs, his faults, all are more meaningful.

So while some people will never forget where they were the night they found out that some extremist, bearded, cave-dwelling Luddite was killed, I will try to never forget where I was when I finished this book for the second time: on my red couch, in my apartment, in Greenwood, Seattle, while listening to Steve Roach's Structures from Silence with my dog Luna curled up at my feet, and my dog Simon asleep, snoring, on the couch cushion.

After all, this is a book about important places, and when you are doing something good, no matter where you are it is an important place.
 
J-Sun, there were a few versions available so I asked around. I got the Everyman's version, which is complete (and there are tons of footnotes, so missing them shortens the work by maybe a quarter) but easy to read. Apparently Penguin's version is more scholarly.

One of the reasons I got it was after reading John Julius Norwich's excellent history about Byzantium, which uses Gibbon as a source.
 
I'm expecting to finally finish "Dead of Night: The collected Ghost Stories" by Oliver Onions over the next day or so before going onto something a lot more modern...
 
Mohammed: I've read The Female Men. It was a bit confusing at times, but eventually quite a thought-provoking exploration of the gender wars (literal at time), I thought. What edition do you have?

Gollum: Not read The Leopard, but I have a copy and am quite interested to know what you think of it. I've seen the book around for years but Javier Marias' thumbnail portrait of the author in his book Written Lives piqued my interest more than anything else.

I've been re-reading the Conan stories in order and also reading a lot of crime fiction - most recently the excellent Beast In View by Margaret Millar and at present The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. I also read a very good novel by Shirley Jackson, The Bird's Nest, which interestingly handled a theme that was similar to the Millar novel.
 
I'm about half way through Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
 
Currently reading - Hello America, by J.G. Ballard

Seems appropriate given the political climate right now; it's all so Ballardian.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
Brian G Turner Emily May's Goodreads reviews Book Discussion 8
GOLLUM May's Manic Mining of Marvelous and Melodious Manuscripts Book Discussion 92
GOLLUM May's Manic Meanderings Into Marvellously Mystical Manuscripts Book Discussion 113
GOLLUM May's Magical Meditations on Masterfully Manafactured Manuscripts Book Discussion 138
Lioness May's Photo Challenge Technology 56

Similar threads


Back
Top