From Way, Way Back in Your Book Backlog

[Extollager]

Its a matter of method of reading, i dont re-read until it has been years and im forgetting a alltime fav book. I havent re-read even books by Lord Dunsany,Vance,other big favs. Why re-read the brilliant books when you can read new reads by great authors.

Excellent question.

Short answer: When I read a book for the first time, it's likely to be largely a matter of finding out what happens next. C. S. Lewis refers to the "narrative lust." The pleasure of finding out what happens to the characters, etc., is legitimate.*

But it is only one of the pleasures provided by reading good books. I think I enjoyed my recent 12th reading of Lord of the Rings more than my 11th reading of it four years ago. By now I know what's going to happen. I want to revisit those locales, I want to hear those wise voices again, I want again that refreshment of the world that I derive from this book. Also, this time I read, simulatenously, Hammon and Scull's reader's companion to LOTR. I do not recommend that anyone read Hammond and Scull until he or she has read LOTR several times, because there is a lot in it about Tolkien's false starts and so on. But I was ready to read it this time. It enhanced my sense of Tolkien's profound literary integrity.

*Some books excite that "narrative lust," that urgent desire to find out what happens next, effectively, but that is about all they do. Those books are the ones that benefit most from our waiting to reread them until we have forgotten them. For example, I might reread Andrew Klavan's Empire of Lies someday, but my impression of it is that it had little to offer me other than narrative excitement.

I have to recommend C. S. Lewis's brief and very rewarding book An Experiment in Criticism. The title is perhaps not attractive. It is really largely about the experience of reading and how not all reading is the same. Since Lewis was such a fan of myth, fantasy, and science fiction, he often refers to works that would appeal to Chronsfolk. I wish I had a bunch of copies on hand to give away to Chronsfolk for the asking; the book really is that good.

 

[Extollager]

I don't think I quite spelled out my point in the posting above.

Reading a good book in order to find out what happened next is good, but that page-turning excitement may actually get in the way of appreciating other qualities. I'm saying that a really good book invites rereading even while you remember your previous reading. Perhaps it is just because you still remember "what happened next" that you can absorb other pleasures that are less narrative-driven.

Why not test the above thesis now, on a short story you remember, such as Dunsany's "Hoard of the Gibbelins"? Anybody who has read it probably remembers the simple plot of this story and the outcome of the knight's quest. I think you may find that "just because" you remember the plot already, you can enjoy the atmosphere and imagery all the more.

 

[Connavar]

You mention the best reason to read, to enjoy other qualities when you know what the story is about. To see things you missed before. I have grown alot as a reader, my ability to see things in stories,analyze now compared to when i started reading more challenging authors,books.

Still i leave the pleasure to re-read, and see other qualities the second, third time only for special books.

I wont ever be like my brother who have read simply entertaining books like HP and thrilling but shallow epic fantasy books for 5-10 times just because its fun entertainment. I expect more than just entertainment when i re-read.

 

[Randy M.]

I hope you will add to it, because several of the things you list above are ones I find intriguing, notably the two Budrys books -- unquestionably among my favorite sf.

Roughly speaking, for at least 30 years my process has been pick one up, say "Oh, yeah. I'll get to that next," put it down, repeat. Why, I don't know. It's not look either novel will take me weeks to get through.

I interviewed Kirk about his ghost stories in the mid-1980s. The interview was conducted in a restaurant in Rantoul, Illinois. He was a perfect subject for an interview -- forthcoming but hardly full of himself; comfortable with the situation; ready to tell a good story. He invited me, my wife and our infant son to visit him at Piety Hill in Michigan, although we didn't follow through on that. I don't care for his Manfred Arcane stories, but most of his ghost stories seem to me at least good entertainment. A good one to start with might be "Behind the Stumps." He's a different writer from Lovecraft, but they both know a lot about creepy rural settings!

I had read one of his stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and ordered the collection. Then promptly didn't read it. That's an unfortunate pattern displayed in my list rather often.

I don't see de la Mare mentioned very often. Have you read "Crewe" yet?

I believe so, in that collection, but so long ago that rereading would by now be like reading something new to me. Last fall I read Ghost Stories by him, a fine collection of previously published and collected work, so my awareness of this unfinished volume is maybe a bit more at the front of my mind than it would have been a year ago. He was a remarkable writer of ghost fiction.

Aickman is, for me, an uneven writer. Don't care for "The Swords," "Mark Ingestre," etc. but admire "The Houses of the Russians," "Into the Wood," etc. Has anyone at Chrons read his short novel The Model? I didn't finish it, though at one time I had read a great deal of his work.

"The Inner Room" and "The Hospice" are favorite stories, and "Ringing the Changes" is very good, as well. But I've struggled with some of stories and a little bit goes a long way. I don't think his collections, for me, are something I can read cover-to-cover. I will eventually finish one of them, I think, but unlike his devoted fans I don't think it'll be through a mass reading of one after the other.

I couldn't tell you how many times I have tried to reread Gormenghast and failed to stick with it. I think the next time, I will just have to skip some of the Prunesquallor stuff, which Peake apparently found a lot funnier than I do.

I haven't tackled it yet. I should have right after finishing Titus Groan but didn't and I'm not really sure why. I know I was bowled over by TG -- the power of his descriptive writing, his ability to put in words the line, color and form his artist's eye perceives just awed me in that novel. Titus Groan had been a backlog book for a couple of decades, at least, and is now one of my favorite fantasy novels. Before I finally read Gormanghast I'll reread TG.

There are a lot of other titles, Extollager. The ones I’m still likely to read include,

SF/F/H
Brian Aldiss: An Island Called Moreau; Helliconia Summer & Helliconia Winter
Clive Barker: Weaveworld; Damnation Game
James Blaylock: The Last Coin
Ramsey Campbell: The Parasite
Clark Ashton Smith: several old pb collections I replaced with the Night Shade collected fantasies; still working my way through the first of these
Karl Edward Wagner: Darkness Weaves
Les Daniels: The Black Castle
Steven Bauer: Satyrday
Larry Niven: Ringworld
Joanna Russ: The Zanzibar Cat
Michael Bishop: Blooded on Arachne; One Winter in Eden
Tanith Lee: the Flat Earth series
M. P. Shiel: Xelucha; The Purple Cloud
William Hope Hodgson: The Night Land; The Ghost Pirates
Robert Heinlein: The Past Through Tomorrow; Stranger in a Strange Land; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Keith Roberts: Pavane
Randall Garrett: Lord Darcy Investigates
C. L. Moore: Jiril of Joiry
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed; The Left Hand of Darkness (given my enjoyment of much of Le Guin's work, I'm a bit ashamed of myself with these. See my note above about Budrys' work; it applies here, too.)

Mainstream
Robert Coover: The Origins of the Brunists
Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers; A Flag for Sunrise
Shirley Jackson: The Road Through the Wall; Hangsaman
Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim; The Secret Agent
John Gardner: Grendal
Chekov: several collections I’ve not even dented
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Elizabeth Bowen: The Heat of the Day
E.M. Forster: A Room with a View
Gunter Grass: The Tin Drum
John Fowles: The Collector; The Magus
Jerzy Koszinski: The Painted Bird
Alasdair Grey: Lanark; 1982 Janine
Peter Carey: Bliss; Illywacker
Walter de la Mare: Memoirs of a Midget
W. Somerset Maugham: Ashenden
B. Traven: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Mystery/Crime
Chester Himes: Cotton Comes to Harlem
Margery Allingham: The Black Dudley Murder
Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die, and several others
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo: the Martin Beck series after The Laughing Policeman
The Julian Symons Omnibus
Davis Grubb: The Night of the Hunter
Patricia Highsmith: Edith’s Diary



Randy M.

 

[Fried Egg]

"The Inner Room" and "The Hospice" are favorite stories, and "Ringing the Changes" is very good, as well. But I've struggled with some of stories and a little bit goes a long way. I don't think his collections, for me, are something I can read cover-to-cover. I will eventually finish one of them, I think, but unlike his devoted fans I don't think it'll be through a mass reading of one after the other.

Oh, I could read them from cover to cover easilly, it's such a pleasure reading his stories. The only reason why I don't is to avoid bringing a good thing to an end too quickly. It will be a sad day the day I have no more to read by him...

 

[Randy M.]

Oh, I could read them from cover to cover easilly, it's such a pleasure reading his stories. The only reason why I don't is to avoid bringing a good thing to an end too quickly. It will be a sad day the day I have no more to read by him...

I find a little goes a long way. Something like "The Swords" or "The Hospice" invites rumination after reading. There's more there than is immediately apparent on the surface.


Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

M. P. Shiel: Xelucha; The Purple Cloud
William Hope Hodgson: The Night Land; The Ghost Pirates
Keith Roberts: Pavane

Mainstream

Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim; The Secret Agent

Randy M.

I have tried to get through The Night Land more than once, but have never go much, if at all, beyond the end of the first of the two volumes of the book as printed in the Ballantine fantasy series. I wish an editor would tackle this text and serve it up to us.

Shiel I've found unreadable, for what that opinion may be worth!

Conrad's Secret Agent is easily one of my favorite English novels. I find myself deliberately reading it slowly.

 

[Randy M.]

I have tried to get through The Night Land more than once, but have never go much, if at all, beyond the end of the first of the two volumes of the book as printed in the Ballantine fantasy series. I wish an editor would tackle this text and serve it up to us.

I've heard this often and that's probably why I've been reluctant to dive in. Still, I made it through the Carnacki stories and The House on the Borderland and with some reservations enjoyed both, so I may yet give it a try.

Shiel I've found unreadable, for what that opinion may be worth!

Even though I occasionally think I'll try again, his "The House of Sounds" put me off years ago. Apparently enough so that I haven't picked up one of his collections since even to just look through it. Still, I occasionally think I ought to try one more time before giving up altogether.

Conrad's Secret Agent is easily one of my favorite English novels. I find myself deliberately reading it slowly.

One of these days ...

Right now I think in the fall my next, "One of these days..." reads will be The House of the Seven Gables -- just mentioning because occasionally I do get to a "one of these days" reads.

Randy M.

 

[Fried Egg]

"The House on the Borderland" and the "Carnacki" stories are exceedingly well written compared with "The Night Land". If you even thought they were a chore you will be unlikely to make it through "The Night Land".

The only thing I will say about "The Night Land" is that once the terrible experience of actually reading it begins to fade, the powerful imagery and vision of it remains with you and I can see why people regard it highly.

 

[Extollager]

That is exactly what I would have expected. Thus I would be very interested to see a presentation of this novel as edited by a first-rate hand.

 

[Extollager]

Right now I think in the fall my next, "One of these days..." reads will be The House of the Seven Gables -- just mentioning because occasionally I do get to a "one of these days" reads.

Randy M.

Go for it! Don't read it expecting just another novel. It is written in a meditative style that must not be hurried. I've read it twice and expect to do so again someday.

I'm a huge fan of Hawthorne's American Notebooks, by the way. There is much good stuff in his English Notebooks, too, the finishing of which is a summer project for me. Ahead: his French and Italian Notebooks.

 

[Fried Egg]

That is exactly what I would have expected. Thus I would be very interested to see a presentation of this novel as edited by a first-rate hand.

Indeed, I had the misfortune of reading a complete and unabridged version...

 

[Extollager]

Indeed, I had the misfortune of reading a complete and unabridged version...

So now that's two people I know as correspondents who have read the entire Night Land. The other is Pierre Comtois, editor of the 'zine Fungi and author of a 2-volume survey of Silver Age Marvel comics. It seems to me that Pierre said he read Hodgson's Night Land years ago while working as a night watchman in a factory.

Pierre has the complete Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, but even he hasn't read every volume. I wonder if anyone here at Chrons has done so. I wouldn't even want to try to!

 

[Extollager]

Right now I think in the fall my next, "One of these days..." reads will be The House of the Seven Gables....Randy M.

Perhaps some Chronsfolk would like to read a column on The House of the Seven Gables that I wrote for a C. S. Lewis journal. By the way, when Lewis wrote the derogatory remark about Americans that I led off with, he was a teenager! He did get past his prejudices about Americans enough to marry one.

*******MAY BE CONSIDERED TO CONTAIN SPOILERS*********

“I intend to read all Hawthorne after this. What a pity such a genius should be a beastly American!”

Lewis urged Arthur Greeves to buy The House of the Seven Gables, in his 29 November 1916 letter. A week before, he had said it was “the most glorious novel (almost) that I have ever read,“ and “I love the idea of a house with a curse! And although there is nothing supernatural in the story itself there is a brooding sense of mystery and fate over the whole thing.”

The book begins with the tradition from colonial days of an injustice perpetrated by a Pyncheon on a social inferior belonging to the Maule family and the “curse” laid on the Pyncheons. Then the main action of this 1851 novel is related. Very little happens. After 30 years of imprisonment for a crime he did not commit, Clifford, agoraphobic, impoverished spinster Hepzibah Pyncheon’s sensitive brother, comes to live with her in the musty, gloomy Salem house of their ancestors. A bustling, pretty seventeen-year-old relative, Phoebe, arrives and helps Hepzibah with her penny-shop, charming passersby who disliked the elderly woman’s nearsighted scowl. Hepzibah’s sole lodger, the young daguerrotypist Holgrave, is attracted to Phoebe. Respectable, greedy Judge Pyncheon thinks Clifford knows of a secret document that will grant extensive Maine property to a Pyncheon. Late in the novel, he demands an interview with Clifford, but dies while waiting for Hepzibah to bring Clifford to him. Hepzibah and Clifford run away and ride the train with no destination in mind; then they return; Phoebe and Holgrave marry, and the House is left deserted.

Clearly, Lewis didn’t require a lot of “action” from a novel. On 29 March 1931 he wrote to Arthur that he’d thought of the novel form in general as “dangerous” to literature because it usually panders to “the passionate lust to ‘see what happened in the end,’” which is a craving injurious to “other, better, but less irresistible, forms of literary pleasure.” The static quality of much of The House of the Seven Gables is enhanced by the way one thing is balanced by another: youthfulness/age, past/present, light/darkness, intellect/feeling, spiritual/sensual, smile/ scowl, hope/disillusionment, freedom/imprisonment.

In The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne’s method is discursive and pictorial rather than incident-driven. Homely objects such as scrawny chickens, a natural wellspring, an elm, the railway, flowers and vegetables, a gold-headed cane, and daguerrotype images are realistic and likely also to function symbolically. The word-picture that Lewis singled out for praise was that of the room in which Judge Pyncheon sits, lifeless, “as the day wears on and the room grows darker – darker”; but, Lewis added, “I must leave you to read that wonderful chapter to yourself.” Lewis also liked Holgrave’s manuscript story about the sad fate of Alice Pyncheon, who was subdued by Matthew Maule’s mesmeric control. The romantic tale reminded Lewis of another inset story, “the Cosmo one” in Chapter 13 of George MacDonald’s Phantastes. MacDonald too was an admirer of Hawthorne’s fiction.

 

[Randy M.]

Thanks for that, Extollager.

Have you read much of Hawthorne's short fiction? I've read a fair portion, though it has been quite a while for most of it and I should reread. Anyway, his short fiction made him a favorite of mine. Like Poe the Gothic sensibility pervades the stories, though I think Hawthorne's stories show a bit more variety than Poe's.


Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

Thanks for that, Extollager. ...Have you read much of Hawthorne's short fiction? Randy M.

I have, and love it. "Rappaccini's Daughter" is the perfect Pre-Raphaelite story. This is a picture of Shakespeare's Juliet, but her appearance (well, she shouldn't be so pale) and the wall around her suggest the Hawthorne story.

"Roger Malvin's Burial" reminds me of Bob Dylan's expression about the "old, weird America" -- the story seems to come out of that kind of sensibility. So does "Young Goodman Brown," especially if you read it that Brown dreamed rather than attended a genuine witches' sabbath; just a story of a life gone all poisoned by distrust. (I actually think that the story can't be read as purely dreamed by Brown, if you sift every word...)

"The Birthmark" is great proto-science fiction. One has to reread "The Minister's Black Veil" from time to time.

"Wakefield" reminds me of the story Sam Spade tells in The Maltese Falcon about the man who disappeared, and whom he traced at last to Tacoma (I think). The guy had decided to make an abrupt break with his old life... you can look up the two stories and compare & contrast!

But yeah, I love Hawthorne. Of all authors, he is one of the ones whose prose gives me most pleasure.

 

[Extollager]

So now that's two people I know as correspondents who have read the entire Night Land. The other is Pierre Comtois, editor of the 'zine Fungi and author of a 2-volume survey of Silver Age Marvel comics. It seems to me that Pierre said he read Hodgson's Night Land years ago while working as a night watchman in a factory.

Pierre has the complete Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, but even he hasn't read every volume. I wonder if anyone here at Chrons has done so. I wouldn't even want to try to!

I checked with Pierre... and he remined me that he has read The Night Land twice. I really should try and man up, and finish at least a first reading.

 

[Randy M.]

You mention several of my favorite Hawthorne stories, except for "Roger Malvin's Burial," which I'm positive I've read but no longer recall at all.

Another favorite Hawthorne story, is "The Artist of the Beautiful." It's been far too long since I first read it, but in my memory it seems like a link between ETA Hoffman and Ray Bradbury.


Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

I'm now halfway through another item from my backlog. Thirty-five years to the day after I bought it, I was on page 100 of my Sphere paperback of Lord Dunsany's The Curse of the Wise Woman. Has anyone here read it?

So far, most of it concerns hunting game birds (snipe, plover, greylag geese) and fox in the Irish Free State. The narrator, Charles James Peridore, whose mother is dead, now resides abroad and is reminiscing about being a boy not quite 17 years old, over 50 years ago. Peridore's father, who escaped through a secret door in the family library, is in hiding because assassins seek his life on account of political grudges. Charles takes advantage of the absence of parental control to indulge in hunting and, with the town doctor, concoct excuses to delay his return to Eton.

I think many readers would not enjoy the many pages devoted to hunting. I do. Dunsany writes very well about bird-stalking at twilight, the beauty of the rising moon, the wind, the cries of birds, treacherous bogs, "lakes," heather. At least two other writers I enjoy also describe gamebird hunting, namely Russia's Turgenev and Sergei Aksakov. There is also quite a bit of such writing, as I recall, in T. H. White somewhere, although I think he may eventually have decided that hunting was wrong.

Peridore also recalls falling in love with a girl a year older than himself. As a lad, he admired Marlin, his father's "bog-watcher," whose aged mother is the story's wise woman. The title refers to her curse, and she hasn't yet made the curse that I expect is coming although there was a reference to her cursing, at last, on page 102. You can see that the pacing of the story isn't brisk.

The book reminds me most of some of John Buchan's writing, with that sense of a settled love of one's place and its outdoors. That sentiment seems to have been a lot more common a century ago, so the book is notable as a window into other times, other commitments.

 

[Connavar]

Books that i havent read yet but i have had long time(long time for my reading experience is 3-4 years) and want to read still is for me these:


The House of Seven Gables - Nathanial Hawthorne
Comedie Humaine History of Thirteen - Honore Balzac
The Worm Ouroboros - E.R Eddison
Doctor Glas - Hjalmar Soderberg
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
Expanded Universe - Robert Heinlein
The Rebel Worlds - Poul Anderson
The Man Who Japed - Philip K Dick
Downbelow Station - CJ Cherryh

The first 3 authors are classic authors that my interest in literature demand i read for the first time. You can see by the other books,authors listed i usually only collect books by fav authors. There are surely many other books i have had for long time but they are less than good authors i outgrew faster than there was time to waste on them.

I dont have time for Dean Koontz,Clive Barkers of the world when i have discovered Ray Bradbury,Robert Aickman and co in similar fields.