Book Hauls!

[thatollie]

Different Seasons - Stephen King
Shadowland - Peter Straub
Battle Royale - Koushun Takami
Gun Machine - Warren Ellis

 

[monsterchic]

So happy that I got a $25 gift card for Barnes and Noble this year for christmas, and was able to get 2 (4 really, one had 3 books in it) books for that amount. The Castings trilogy, by Pamela Freeman, and Anathem, by Neal Stephenson (haven't been able to get into it...not enough dialogue). I also bought Best Served Cold. Great purchases

 

[Randy M.]

Just finished The Complete John Silence Stories by Algernon Blackwood. Good fun, a bit uneven in the writing. His underlying believe in how the supernatural/paranormal/weird works comes to the surface a bit too much at times, but two of the stories have Silence as peripheral to the main action and those are very good: "Ancient Sorceries" and "Secret Worship."

Now rereading Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood.


Randy M.

 

[Fried Egg]

Just finished The Complete John Silence Stories by Algernon Blackwood. Good fun, a bit uneven in the writing. His underlying believe in how the supernatural/paranormal/weird works comes to the surface a bit too much at times, but two of the stories have Silence as peripheral to the main action and those are very good: "Ancient Sorceries" and "Secret Worship."

Now rereading Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood.

I think you might have got the wrong thread .

I'm also reading Algernon Blackwood's "Incredible Adventures". I know what you mean about his views coming to the surface a bit too much, it's the same in this collection, but still very good.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I was in a used bookstore located inside a newspaper office in a small town here in Tennessee. It was the usual "paperback shack" kind of thing. I did manage to find this item:

 

[dask]

Really cool!

 

[AE35Unit]

a (hopefully) funny for free!

 

[dask]

Also picked up a couple of old hardbacks without dust jackets:

A CHILMARK MISCELLANY by Van Wyck Brooks
VAN LOON'S LIVES by Hendrik Willem van Loon

 

[Extollager]

John Wain's The Living World of Shakespeare.

If the name sounds familiar -- and I'm not thinking of the Duke -- it could be because Wain wrote one of the first accounts of what the Lewis-Tolkien Inklings were like, in a precocious autobiography, Sprightly Running, that is often mentioned. But the part that maybe made the most impression on me was his account of the eccentric Meyerstein, an independent scholar shunned by Oxford. Wain shows something of the same literary skill that he displayed at full length in his book on the great, if eccentric, Samuel Johnson -- a biography I recommend highly.

 

[dask]

John Wain's The Living World of Shakespeare.

If the name sounds familiar -- and I'm not thinking of the Duke -- it could be because Wain wrote one of the first accounts of what the Lewis-Tolkien Inklings were like, in a precocious autobiography, Sprightly Running, that is often mentioned. But the part that maybe made the most impression on me was his account of the eccentric Meyerstein, an independent scholar shunned by Oxford. Wain shows something of the same literary skill that he displayed at full length in his book on the great, if eccentric, Samuel Johnson -- a biography I recommend highly.

After thinking about for a fairly long while at last year's library book sale, I decided to pick up Wain's JOHNSON figuring I'd read it after I got around to Boswell's. Twenty-five, fifty cents, something like that. Nice hardback with dj.

By the way, didn't you give a good recommendation for Peter Ackroyd's bio of Charles Dickens a while back? Bookstore in town has copy, second hand hardback. Is it really that good?

 

[Southern Geologist]

I came across some unexpected money so February's orders are coming early.

For Kindle:

Robert Heinlein - The Door Into Summer
H.P. Lovecraft - The Complete Collection
Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
E.E. Smith - Second Stage Lensman, Children of the Lens, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark DuQuesne

In the mail:

Isaac Asimov (editor) - Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s
A.E. Van Vogt - The Voyage of the Space Beagle

 

[Extollager]

After thinking about for a fairly long while at last year's library book sale, I decided to pick up Wain's JOHNSON figuring I'd read it after I got around to Boswell's. Twenty-five, fifty cents, something like that. Nice hardback with dj.

By the way, didn't you give a good recommendation for Peter Ackroyd's bio of Charles Dickens a while back? Bookstore in town has copy, second hand hardback. Is it really that good?

Yes, I recommended Ackroyd's Dickens. It's the only Dickens biography that I have read, but I thought he had a good feeling for Dickens's love of London, for the abundance and weirdness of many of Dickens's characters, etc. Conversely, a more recent biography of Dickens sounded, from reviews, like something that might become tedious reading, but if you already have it or Edgar Johnson's you might not need the Ackroyd. But offhand I would say the Wain on Johnson might be better on Johnson than Ackroyd on Dickens is on Dickens, because I think Wain has a more profound love of first-rate literature than Ackroyd does. I could be mistaken about that, though.

 

[GOLLUM]

Today...

Riddley Walker - Russel Hoban *Latest SF Masterworks offering...and it was in HB. Appears to be well regarded work. I've not read it. Blurb: Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place the same. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Riddley Walker - orphaned, outcast and quite alone - goes on a journey through a post-apocalyptic England, telling his tale in language which reflects the decayed world around him.

Tales of the German Imagination - from Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann. *New Penguin black classics edn. This looks like an excellent anthology. Whilst I recognise about 2/3 of the authors who from my experience are all of a high quality (incl. Kafka, Musil, Walser, Von Kleist, Tieck, Hoffmann, Heym & Rilke) there are others I'm not familiar with. *anyone interested they also had a very good looking penguin classic edition of a Russian Fantasy anthology. Blurb: Bringing together tales of melancholy and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from the past 200 years. Ranging from the Romantics of the early nineteenth century to works of contemporary fiction, it includes Hoffmann's hallucinatory portrait of terror and insanity 'The Sandman'; Chamisso's influential black masterpiece 'Peter Schlemiel', where a man barters his own shadow; Kafka's chilling, disturbing satire 'In the Penal Colony'; the Dadaist surrealism of Kurt Schwitters' 'The Onion'; and Bachmann's modern fairy tale 'The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran'. Macabre, dreamlike and expressing deep unconscious fears, these stories are also spiked with unsettling humour, showing stylistic daring as well as giving insight into the darkest recesses of the human condition.Peter Wortsman's powerful translations are accompanied by brief overviews of the lives of each author, and an introduction discussing the notion of 'angst' and the stories' place in the context of German history.

*Weird that amazon where I grabbed the book's back blurb from has the knidle edition out now but the paperback edn. not released unitl Feb 2013/ yet I have a copy purcahsed form my local bookshop today..go figure?

 

[Mangara]

Today...

Riddley Walker - Russel Hoban *Latest SF Masterworks offering...and it was in HB. Appears to be well regarded work. I've not read it. Blurb: Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place the same. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Riddley Walker - orphaned, outcast and quite alone - goes on a journey through a post-apocalyptic England, telling his tale in language which reflects the decayed world around him.
[/SIZE]

Ooh! Look forward to what you make of this, I like the sound of it!

 

[GOLLUM]

Ooh! Look forward to what you make of this, I like the sound of it!

I confess I had never heard of the author and therefore this book until Masterworks published it. Sadly Hoban died in December 2012. He appears to have been very active and penned quite a lot of children's fiction in addition to poetry. Ridley Walker won the John W Campbell award for best new writer back in '82 for this work. The fact that Adam Roberts, a writer I greatly admire, provides a pretty positive Introduction to this work (calling it a towering masterpiece of post war fiction) also encourages me to think it's going to be a good 'un.

 

[nerd literature]

As I prepare to present my first paper at NecronomiCon 2013 I have been gathering some of Lovecraft's influence and since my OCD some times takes the form of having sameness, I have been buying them as Penguin editions. I know many if not all are ebook and free on many different sites I still like the tactile sense of reading. Yesterday, I picked up Walpole's, "Castle of Otranto" and Machen's "White People and Other Weird Stories". If there is anyone out there that likes this era horror or supernatural stories Wordsworth put out its collection of Tales of Mystery & Supernatural which have great covers.

 

[GOLLUM]

Yesterday, I picked up Walpole's, "Castle of Otranto" and Machen's "White People and Other Weird Stories". If there is anyone out there that likes this era horror or supernatural stories Wordsworth put out its collection of Tales of Mystery & Supernatural which have great covers.

Indeed. I have all of the Wordsworth supernatural series (that I'm interested in) to date and it's generally of an excellent standard and highly affordable. In case you've not spotted it yet, we have a thread on this series....http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/49016-wordworth-tales-of-mystery-and-supernatural.html

Cheers.

 

[Southern Geologist]

Just added Childhood's End to my kindle and ordered Rocket Science (edited by our own Ian Sales) from the publisher. I'm definitely looking forward to the latter, in particular the essay The Complexity of the Humble Space Suit.

 

[AE35Unit]

Yesterday, I picked up Walpole's, "Castle of Otranto" and Machen's "White People and Other Weird Stories". If there is anyone out there that likes this era horror or supernatural stories Wordsworth put out its collection of Tales of Mystery & Supernatural which have great covers.

I have Castle of Otranto as ebook, great story!

 

[dask]

Finally came in:

Not my book of the moment yet, have to finish GULLIVER OF MARS first. Shouldn't take too long, I hope. An interesting bit from the biographical note at the beginning gave me an idea for a new Hawthorne anthology I'd like to see, the tales and articles he produced during his "long stint as a nameless hack writer for New England magazines and Christmas annuals." I wonder if we even know which ones they are.