August Reading Thread

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dask said:
Finished The Gray Prince by Jack Vance, another marvelous romp through the exotic imagination of the undisputed king of the action verb. Next is:
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Will be interesting to find out whether this is a mainstreamer masquerading as sf or the other way around.
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Great read, one of Deighton's finest, I've read it three times at least.
 
A Private Cosmos Philip Jose Farmer. A nostalgic reread. Thrilled me age 13, less interesting now.

The Best of The Spirit Will Eisner. Collection of the classic cartoon strip. Very good and very stylish. Requires a bit of thought. These are rightly revered: Eisner developed a language of strips that is now so familiar that we probably do not see it.

Comics and Sequential Art Will Eisner. Purchased on the back of the above, because I was interested to see what Eisner himself has to say. Very good. As always, it takes huge talent to make explanation so simple.

The World The World Norman Lewis. I have written lots on Chrons about this great travel writer and journalist. This is a set of reminiscences written in his later years. Very interesting for Lewis fans but not a place for a newbie to start.
 
strawman said:
Yes... for me, Always Coming Home is a very special book. Le Guin conjures up a people, a land, an entire culture. Their tales, dances, poems, symbols, drawings, songs, customs, their maps and alphabet. An imaginary northern Californian utopia about people who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.”

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality…” Ursula Le Guin (“Freedom”)
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Well, I don't know what to say to this. I think I'll just go and reread a few pages of that book.:D
 
I'm currently having a go at a "cosy mystery" novel.
Guilty by Definition, written by Susie Dent (her from dictionary corner in Countdown).

It's intriguing so far, but I'm a bit hampered because there's a lot of allusions to Shakespeare and I lack the knowledge.
 
Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings by Jean Manco
This is a nicely written, informative, overview of all the journeys ancient peoples have made into Europe, from the neolithic to the vikings. The author combines information from archaeology, linguistic evidence, ancient texts and DNA, both ancient, y-DNA, mtDNA, and modern DNA. Fascinating, with a lovely collection of maps and diagrams. Could probably do with an update by now, though.
 
I have just started Ice by Anna Kavan (1967; my copy is a 1970 paperback.) Surrealism, slipstream, New Wave? Anyway, it's about a nameless man seeking a nameless woman in a world of encroaching ice. Realistic narrative is frequently interrupted by what must be delusions on the part of the nameless narrator.
 
Richard McKenna "Casey Agonistes & Other SF and Fantasy Stories"
Sadly McKenna wrote so little before his early death in 1964, aged just 51.
From age 18 to 40 he served in the U.S. Navy, then took a creative writing course at North Carolina. Well liked and admired in life, it's sad there was only time for these few stories and a few others posthumously published.
I haven't read "The Sand Pebbles", the book that catapulted him to fame concerning a US gunboat on the Yangtse.
 
Victoria Silverwolf said:
I have just started Ice by Anna Kavan (1967; my copy is a 1970 paperback.) Surrealism, slipstream, New Wave? Anyway, it's about a nameless man seeking a nameless woman in a world of encroaching ice. Realistic narrative is frequently interrupted by what must be delusions on the part of the nameless narrator.
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I read that back in 2018 and, well, it wasn't one for me, and I'm surprised I managed to finish it. My take on it, posted here in the June (I've not put it in spoilers as there really isn't much of a plot to spoil!):

If anyone wants to have a definition of a Literary Novel, Ice, written in 1967, is it. Some wonderful imagery and turns of phrase, but no plot; set in a never-identified or identifiable world, peopled with characters without names or personalities, with things happening without relevance to the non-plot, dei ex machina forever cropping up to allow more things to happen, other things happening which didn't happen but were only imagined or envisaged or hallucinated or... well... I've no idea. The first person narrator spends the novel pursuing -- and alternately wanting to love and to hurt -- a vulnerable and pathetic (in both senses of the word) woman who is repeatedly lusted after, hurt and abducted by other men, while the war-torn world around them turns to ice, and everyone and everything is doomed. It's doubtless all very allegorical and clever -- the cover quotes praise from Brian Aldiss and JG Ballad -- but for me, simply wanting a good read, it was akin to listening to a poetic bore re-telling his latest nightmare. Impenetrable and baffling; its only saving grace its brevity, at a scant 180 pages.​
 
The Judge said:
I read that back in 2018 and, well, it wasn't one for me, and I'm surprised I managed to finish it. My take on it, posted here in the June (I've not put it in spoilers as there really isn't much of a plot to spoil!):

If anyone wants to have a definition of a Literary Novel, Ice, written in 1967, is it. Some wonderful imagery and turns of phrase, but no plot; set in a never-identified or identifiable world, peopled with characters without names or personalities, with things happening without relevance to the non-plot, dei ex machina forever cropping up to allow more things to happen, other things happening which didn't happen but were only imagined or envisaged or hallucinated or... well... I've no idea. The first person narrator spends the novel pursuing -- and alternately wanting to love and to hurt -- a vulnerable and pathetic (in both senses of the word) woman who is repeatedly lusted after, hurt and abducted by other men, while the war-torn world around them turns to ice, and everyone and everything is doomed. It's doubtless all very allegorical and clever -- the cover quotes praise from Brian Aldiss and JG Ballad -- but for me, simply wanting a good read, it was akin to listening to a poetic bore re-telling his latest nightmare. Impenetrable and baffling; its only saving grace its brevity, at a scant 180 pages.​
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That's a fair analysis. I'm finding myself enjoying it despite all these lacks of what is normally found in fiction. (But then, I liked Report on Probability A by Brain Aldiss, which quite deliberately has no plot.)

Why? For one thing, the contrast between the nonlinear and contradictory events -- often there is a paragraph describing happenings that simply cannot have occurred after those described in the previous paragraph -- and the direct, simple language. For another, the contrast between events that seem straight out of a suspense thriller -- chases, arrests, imprisonments, escapes, etc. -- and the fact that there appears to be no possibility at all (so far) of a resolution.

Not for all tastes, indeed! I'm finding it similar to both Kafka and Ballard.
 
HareBrain said:
Still going with The Wounded Land. Typical of Stephen Donaldson's Covenant Chronicles, it has episodes of rare, possibly unique imaginative power surrounded by sludge, and the former are worth putting up with the latter, but barely. I can still see why the series captivated me in my long-ago youth, but I don't know if I'll carry on after this one. I recall The One Tree as being an ordeal by tedium.

My parallel read, which by contrast I have no trouble recommending: Running Up That Hill, 50 Visions of Kate Bush, by Tom Doyle.
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Didn't quite finish the reread of TWL, but I got the best out of it, and don't regret reading most of it. Won't carry on with the series though.

The Kate Bush book was very good.

Now on a reread of Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black. (A search on here shows the last time I read it was 2011. Where do the years go?)
 
The God of Endings, by Jacqueline Holland. Well-written and compelling, but not to be read or digested in a day. I finished reading it more than a week ago, but it has taken me this long to think about it and write a review (though that is partly because of outside distractions and my general muddle-headedness), the end result of which is to be found in the Review forum here: The God of Endings, by Jacqueline Holland
 
Bick said:
I'm now onto the second book in the Star Trek trilogy I'm currently reading, Destiny, Book 2: Mere Mortals, by David Mack. This has started really well. The first book in the trilogy was good and entertaining, but this promises to be even better (if you like this kind of thing).
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This was very entertaining - now started the final book in the trilogy by David Mack: Destiny, Book 3: Lost Souls.
 
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