Book Hauls!

[Victoria Silverwolf]

We got some stuff at the local library book sale. Notable among them were three collections of stories by William Tenn, Past Master by R. A. Lafferty, Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon, To Walk the Night by William Sloane, and Hospital of the Transfiguration by Stanislaw Lem (not speculative fiction.)

 

[hitmouse]

Past Master is good. RA Lafferty is worth it in small quantities.

 

[j d worthington]

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.

I recall, shortly after I first encountered Tolkien, a friend loaning me several issues of Mythlore/Tolkien Journal, including the one pictured upper left. I quite enjoyed those, and it's nice to know one can get photocopies of them still. I might have to look into acquiring a few of those now and again.....

 

[antiloquax]

Just downloaded "The Prisoner of Zenda" from Project Gutenberg. I've been in the mood for some old-fashioned yarns recently and I've been hitting the works of John Buchan pretty hard. I remember reading this as a kid, so I thought I'd see what I think of it now.

 

[Extollager]

I recall, shortly after I first encountered Tolkien, a friend loaning me several issues of Mythlore/Tolkien Journal, including the one pictured upper left. I quite enjoyed those, and it's nice to know one can get photocopies of them still. I might have to look into acquiring a few of those now and again.....

Yes -- and many of the back issues available are still the original printings -- at a mere $3.50 an issue.

 

[Extollager]

Just downloaded "The Prisoner of Zenda" from Project Gutenberg. I've been in the mood for some old-fashioned yarns recently and I've been hitting the works of John Buchan pretty hard. I remember reading this as a kid, so I thought I'd see what I think of it now.

What've you read by Buchan?

I don't find a Buchan thread, so I will start one under the classic area -- maybe there would be the place to reply!

 

[hitmouse]

John Buchan (ex Governor General of Canada) is good for period thrills.
Really enjoyed Prester John and The Thirty-Nine Steps. The Hitchcock film of the latter is worth a look.

Picked up the books off my grandfather's shelves when I was in my early teens, along with H Rider Haggard. Preferred Buchan.

 

[j d worthington]

Yes -- and many of the back issues available are still the original printings -- at a mere $3.50 an issue.

Thanks for that, Dale. I'll definitely look into that a little further along!

John Buchan (ex Governor General of Canada) is good for period thrills.
Really enjoyed Prester John and The Thirty-Nine Steps. The Hitchcock film of the latter is worth a look.

Picked up the books off my grandfather's shelves when I was in my early teens, along with H Rider Haggard. Preferred Buchan.

Buchan also wrote a fair number of rather good supernatural tales, many of which were collected together in various editions. (The one I have is simply titled Supernatural Tales.) His novel, Witch Wood, while not perhaps quite supernatural, certainly verges closely enough to the weird to be quite effective....

 

[Bick]

Back from hols. I've obtained up a few new books in the last couple of weeks:
Eric Newby - A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Magnus Mills - The Restraint of Beasts
Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers (currently reading)
C J Cherryh - The Faded Sun Trilogy (following recommendations on Chrons)
George Eliot - Silas Marner
P G Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves; The Code of the Woosters; Joy in the Morning

Looking forward to that lot.

 

[GOLLUM]

Back from hols. I've obtained up a few new books in the last couple of weeks:
Eric Newby - A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Magnus Mills - The Restraint of Beasts
Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers (currently reading)
C J Cherryh - The Faded Sun Trilogy (following recommendations on Chrons)
George Eliot - Silas Marner
P G Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves; The Code of the Woosters; Joy in the Morning

Looking forward to that lot.

Interesting haul. Anything by or about Woodehouse particularly involving Jeeves and Wooster is worth reading. I have the complete box set of the BBC series and several Wodehouse (book) collections besides.

I only have Eliot's Middlemarch, a novel I admire greatly. I've never read anything else by Eliot although I've often wondered about novels like Silas Marner, Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda. Apparently the film Silas Marner is supposed to be quite good.

I'm not a big fan of Cherryh per se and Niven's original Ringworld was good but anything else I don't really know about.

Eric Newby rings some bells but I'm not familiar with that book. Never heard of Magnus Mills. Care to elaborate?

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I am not an "anti-literary" snob (anti-snob?) at all -- I adore Moby Dick, among many others -- but I have to admit that I found Silas Marner nearly intolerably dull. Of course, I was required to read it for school, which may color my opinion.

 

[Bick]

Never heard of Magnus Mills. Care to elaborate?

Very dry, rather surreal, deadpan humor, and very English. Restraint of Beasts was shortlisted for the Booker prize. I've also read his novel "All Quiet on the Orient Express". The latter is a wonderful read, to my mind. A couple of quotes from reviews for Orient Express below. I heartily recommend the book.

"A masterpiece. Kafka would have been proud. Wondering why I was reading this bizarre tale of everyday Lake District life, I kept waiting for something substantive to happen and when it did, it hit like a sledgehammer. Rarely has a book had that impact: A collision with my sensibilities and my world perception which lingered for an age afterwards. I simply could not stop thinking about it. Parable, metaphor, allegory, or shaggy dog story. I simply don't know. I spent the following month wondering how he did it."

"It is like a slow motion train wreck. Everything is perfectly friendly on the surface but you are cringing as the narrator moves closer and closer to tragedy through a series of benign events."

"It's not out of idle amusement that the sweetly fiendish author has named his book All Quiet on the Orient Express. This marriage of famous titles hides from view (yet points to) its dark, telling twin: Murder on the Western Front. Not since Kafka has an author lured his audience so innocently, so beguilingly, into hell."

"In this creepy, deadpan novel , nothing much happens - except that one man slowly, painlessly, surrenders his life."

 

[Bick]

...I have to admit that I found Silas Marner nearly intolerably dull. Of course, I was required to read it for school, which may color my opinion.

I haven't read it yet - I may agree with you!
(Though hopefully not)

 

[Extollager]

Back from hols. I've obtained up a few new books in the last couple of weeks:
Eric Newby - A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
George Eliot - Silas Marner

I've read and thought these were worth reading -- for what that may be worth.

 

[antiloquax]

Finally got around to converting some Philip K. Dick .pdfs I have so I can read them comfortably on my Kindle.
There are quite a few of Dick's major works I have yet to read (eg. Martian Time-Slip).
Quite keen to read The Man Who Japed and The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. The latter is an anthology put together by Lawrence Sutin and contains some extracts from The Exegesis .

George Eliot is great. It's well worth checking out her book The Lifted Veil - it's about telepathy and it's brilliant. My other favourites of hers are Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.

 

[K-9]

Anything by or about Woodehouse particularly involving Jeeves and Wooster is worth reading. I have the complete box set of the BBC series and several Wodehouse (book) collections besides.

oh?!?!?! does BBC really produced a series on Jeeves?? what a WANDERFUL NEWS!!! (er, new for me )
is it a good transposition?? of course it is, you bought the box set !
... no chanse to find it in italian translation, I guess

 

[Randy M.]

[...]I only have Eliot's Middlemarch, a novel I admire greatly. I've never read anything else by Eliot although I've often wondered about novels like Silas Marner, Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda. Apparently the film Silas Marner is supposed to be quite good.

Slightly left of this, I've only read Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel. I thought it quite good, but I was reading it in the context of a class on feminist theory that included reading Dicken's David Cooperfield and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It's possible I'd have found it dry outside that context, but I appreciated the way Eliot crafted her story and the feminist reading made a good deal of sense to me.


Randy M.

 

[antiloquax]

My OH just bought me Christopher Priest's new book - The Adjacent in hardback.
I don't normally buy hardback books, so I am delighted.

 

[hitmouse]

oh?!?!?! does BBC really produced a series on Jeeves?? what a WANDERFUL NEWS!!! (er, new for me )
is it a good transposition?? of course it is, you bought the box set !
... no chanse to find it in italian translation, I guess

The BBC must have done dozens of Wodehouse adaptation sover the years, on radio and TV.

The fairly recent and possibly most celebrated is the Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie Jeeves and Wooster. The DVD might have Italian subtitles.

 

[Extollager]

Harry Harrison (editor) -- Worlds of Wonder anthology: