Book Hauls!

[Extollager]

This was a picture (main one) in the Bilbo's Last Song book that didn't get things right, I thought:

 

[Extollager]

I think part of the secret for Baynes's success is that she does not give you an attempt at a "photographic" representation of Middle-earth. Her work truly complements that of Lewis, Tolkien, et al. John Rateliff has said that Tolkien describes landscapes as remembered, not attempting to describe them exhaustively, and so Baynes's art would work well with that.

Offhand I think the other artist who illustrated Tolkien successfully was Tim Kirk, notably in the pictures for the 1975 calendar published by Ballantine. He too doesn't attempt to give a "realistic" rendering.

I'd say Alan Lee is pretty good. In general I don't much like Naismith, Howe, or (descending farther) Darrell Sweet. The Hildebrandt Brothers -- the "wax figure" guys -- can be amusing. How about this Tom Bombadil, who looks like a hippie about to throw a pie in Henry Kissinger's face?

 

[Allegra]

What amazing artwork!

Just bought A Song of Ice and Fire book 3, 4, 5. Can't wait to read and post some serious spoilers before season 4 comes out next year.

 

[GOLLUM]

Over the weekend picked up Neil Gaiman's latest offering...

The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman. It's hard not to feel enthused about reading this book notwithstanding the generally excellent track record of its author to date. I'm not sure if I can recall many books that have arrived with quite so much fanfare and almost without exception glowing reviews from the TLS to the New York Times to fans across the board. Blurb: THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE is a fable that reshapes modern fantasy: moving, terrifying and elegiac - as pure as a dream, as delicate as a butterfly's wing, as dangerous as a knife in the dark, from storytelling genius Neil Gaiman. It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed - within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang.

@Extollager: Those are some quite striking illustrations you've posted there.

 

[Bick]

Inspired by Extollager's PTL thread, I have ordered some Eric Newby. (New, so not in PTL versions, but the latest pb editions look quite nice). I read lots of Paul Theroux a long time ago but didn't try other travel writing, which was odd, so Newby will be new to me - looking forward to Hindu Kush especially.

 

[Bick]

...and while I'm waiting for the Newby to show up, I picked up Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" from my local bookstore. Fantastic; I love how his protagonists manage to communicate so much without actually saying much at all. Lots of prolonged awkward silences and strained spousal relationships.

 

[GOLLUM]

...and while I'm waiting for the Newby to show up, I picked up Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" from my local bookstore. Fantastic; I love how his protagonists manage to communicate so much without actually saying much at all. Lots of prolonged awkward silences and strained spousal relationships.

You should try Carver's poetry. It's also good. His proprensity towards what is termed 'embedded narrative' is one of his greatest strengths.

If you like the minmalist approach as you appear to do Bick, you should check out one of its greatest exponents and certainly enigmatic masters in the Swiss writer Robert Walser. I have several of Walser's works. His novel Jakob Von Gunten is a masterpeice and one of the most enigmatic and greatest works of 20th Century Literature.

Following is Wayne Koetsenbaum's brilliant summary of Walser's style. Perhaps it will strike a chord with you or define some aspect of your relationship as a reader with Carver?

1. I love Walser for embracing nobody status, transvaluing the state of dwelling on the bottom.
2. I love Walser for his quick changes of tone, instantly shifting the scales of self-image (and of objective reality) from grandiose enlargement to abject diminutiveness (like Emily Dickinson’s oscillations of scale).
3. I love Walser for his delicacy of temperament, his vulnerability (his aura of being always already bruised), mixed with a hardy self-reliance and emotional equipoise, unto hypomania.
4. I love Walser for being socially maladroit.
5. I love walser for writing chimerical essays, quirky lyric flights and fragments rather than easily digestible fictions. His effects hinge on the fragile indutable authenticity of his voice.
6. I love Walser for being always alert to his mood during the act of writing itself..and so the prose becomes a record of its process of composition as if prefiguring the tenents of action painting or the poetics of process that strem from so-called projective verse.

 

[Bick]

You should try Carver's poetry. It's also good.

I'll do that, Gollum. I don't read much poetry, but I'd probably like Carver's.

...you should check out one of its greatest exponents and certainly enigmatic masters in the Swiss writer Robert Walser

Many thanks for the recommendation! This is why i love this site: lots of recommendations to read authors I would otherwise never have heard of. I'm even more tempted to read Walser when I read on the web that he didn't belong to any kind of literary school, loved long lonely walks and ended up mad. These are the signs of flawed genius at work! He sounds a bit like an early 20th century literary version of Nick Drake.

 

[GOLLUM]

Many thanks for the recommendation! This is why i love this site: lots of recommendations to read authors I would otherwise never have heard of. I'm even more tempted to read Walser when I read on the web that he didn't belong to any kind of literary school, loved long lonely walks and ended up mad. These are the signs of flawed genius at work! He sounds a bit like an early 20th century literary version of Nick Drake.

Actually Walser did initally suffer a breakdown but after a period of time deliberately committed himself to a life spent at the Asylum partly at least to remove himself from mainstream society spending the last 25 years of his life there. This was idosynchratic of Walser's minimalist approach....working dilligently to become a nobody...an 'utterly spherical zero' as a character notes in Jakob Von Gunten. As you may guess, Walser also possesed an acutely whimiscal humour.

He was also somewhat iornically found dead at the age of seventy eight in the snow after going for a walk away from the confines of the Santorium, this for a man where long meditative walks was one of his main pleasures. As J.M Coetze notes and Elias Canetti before him (among others) the photo of Walser's dead body lying in the snow has become a somewhat iconic image posted (shamelessly so they assert) by literary scholars.

He wrote some wonderful things while he was there including many of his now celebrated microscripts, a direct physical expression of his minimalist approach. These were published recently in English with photos of the orignal microscript..amazing stuff. Here's a blurb on them:

Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card.

I should also add my personal interest in Walser also stems from my Swiss background and the additional fact that my Father was born not that far from Walser...

 

[Extollager]

Received today a copy of scholar and editor George Sampson's 1947 Cambridge UP book Seven Essays. It still has its dustjacket, albeit price-clipped and in two pieces. I note with pleasure an essay on Bach and Shakespeare. Ah, but what put me on to this book? A footnote by Christopher Palmer in his selection The Collected Arthur Machen (page 9).

Palmer says "it appears that Sampson and Machen were profoundly like-minded" on the basis of the former's essay "A Boy and His Books" and "Truth and Beauty" in the essay selection, plus another Sampson book, English for the English.

Sampson is best known for The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature -- which I nabbed as a library discard years ago.

 

[bluespider100]

Now I'm trying to save up for LeatherBound copies of authors that I like, and put them on a separate shelf.

 

[dask]

Speaking of library discards I saw a nice Modern Library hardback of HUMPHRY CLINKER by Tobias Smollett with an introduction by Arthur Machen on the freebie shelves but didn't grab it. Probably should have.

 

[GOLLUM]

Yep you should have grabbed that Dask. I have a Penguin edition of Humphrey Clinker but it definitely does not boast an introduction by Arthur Machen. Would have been fascinating plus just about any Modern Library HB is worth getting.

Meantime I had a pretty good haul...

Wasp - Eric Frank Russell. *SF Masterwork Spotted this recent edition to the Masterwork ranks. Blurb: The war had been going on for nearly a year and Earth needed an edge. Which was where James Mowry came in. If a wasp buzzing around in a car could distract the driver enough to cause him to crash, what havoc could one elite operative wreak on an unsuspecting enemy? Intensively trained, his appearance surgically altered, Mowry is landed deep in enemy territory. His mission is simple: sap morale, cause mayhem, tie up resources. In a word be a wasp. First published in 1957, Wasp is generally regarded as Eric Frank Russell's best novel , a witty and exciting account of a covert war in the heart of enemy territory.

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr - E.T.A. Hoffman *Penguin black classics have reissued this, the final novel by one of Germany's greatest story tellers. Blurb: Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler. As the two versions break off and alternate at dramatic moments, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion - Murr, the confident scholar, lover, carouser and brawler, and the moody, hypochondriac genius Kreisler. In his exuberant and bizarre novel, Hoffmann brilliantly evokes the fantastic, the ridiculous and the sublime within the humdrum bustle of daily life, making "The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr" (1820-22) one of the funniest and strangest novels of the nineteenth century.

Hadji Murat - Leo Tolstoy *Rather than source a collection of Tolstoy's shorter fiction I went with this OneWorld classic, one of his best shorter works. Blurb: Hadji Murat, one of the most feared and venerated mountain chiefs in the Chechen struggle against the Russians, defects from the Muslim rebels after feuding with his ruling Imam, Shamil. Hoping to protect his family, he joins the Russians, who accept him but never put their trust in him - and so Murat must find another way to end the struggle.

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia - Samuel Johnson *One of Johnson's best known (and arguably best) prose works and something I've wanted to read for a while now. Alternate Blurb: Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, leaves the easy life of the Happy Valley, accompanied by his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the much-travelled philosopher Imlac. Their journey takes them to Egypt, where they study the various conditions of men's lives, before returning home in a 'conclusion in which nothing is concluded'. Johnson's tale is not only a satire on optimism, but also an expression of truth about the human mind and its infinite capacity for hope.

Greek Fiction: Callirhoe, Daphnis and Chloe, Letters of Chion.*Fascinating Penguin black classic collection of early AD non-epic Greek fiction. Blurb: A fascinating counterpoint to the monumental epics of ancient Greece, Greek Fiction features three novelistic works written between the first and fourth centuries AD. Chariton's "Callirhoe"-perhaps the first novel ever written-is the stirring tale of two star-crossed lovers who are torn apart when Callirhoe is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Longus's "Daphnis and Chloe" tells the story of a boy and girl-both abandoned at birth-who grow up to fall in love and battle pirates. "Letters of Chion" is an early thriller about tyranny and political assassination. Together these works open a welcome window onto ancient Greece's little-explored legacy of prose fiction.

 

[Hober Mallow]

Just finished reading The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. Great novel.

 

[AE35Unit]

Saw this in a discount book shop today and had to have it, especially at that price!

The author is Matthew Brzezinski and is dated 2007.

 

[gully_foyle]

Just found I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, a posthumous collection of Philip K Dick short stories published around the traps. Looks very cool.

 

[Randy M.]

Just found I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, a posthumous collection of Philip K Dick short stories published around the traps. Looks very cool.

Can't speak for the other stories, but the title story (a.k.a. "Frozen Journey") is terrific.


Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

A batch of back issues of Mythlore arrived. You can see offerings of these Tolkien-related 'zines from dealers who ask prices much higher than those charged by the Mythopoeic Society itself, which sells all issues of Mythlore, Tolkien Journal, etc. Once their stocks of original printings are gone, they sell photocopies. They state whether the issues offered are photocopies or not. The TJs are all photocopies.

Inactive Publications | Mythopoeic Society

Old Mythlore, Mythprint, Tolkien Journal issues often had nice artwork by the likes of Tim Kirk and (later) Patrick Wynne.

 

[Bugg]

I went on Amazon with the intention of ordering R. Scott Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before (cos my local Waterstones didn't have it) and ended up ordering the three volume Del Rey collection of Robert E. Howard's 'Conan' stories instead. It was more expensive than getting the 'Complete Chronicles' hardback but apparently more comprehensive. I only had a Kindle version before, which was riddled with spelling mistakes.

 

[Extollager]

A colleague in the English Department is clearing out her office before moving to a different university. There are heaps of books in my office for relocation with me and others. Little to mention as regards science fiction and fantasy so far, but some excellent classics, historical works, etc.