July, you said you read that already!

Decided to start with John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos, (which through 180 pages is fantastic), and also Sarah Moentte's Melusine.

On the the none genre front, reading Yukio Mishima's Golden Pavilion.
 
The Long Walk by Stephen King.

This was one of the Bachman books. The entire novel is set in the course of a macabre walkathon in some totalitarian alternate history in King's Maine where the chosen participants (a hundred at the start) must keep walking without halt till only one of them is left. Their progress is tracked by soldiers with sophisticated gauges and anybody who stops or slows down too many times is shot dead.

King starts off the book without any preamble and manages to successfully evoke the tense atmopshere...the fear building up inside the participants, their friendships and rivalries, the effect of physical exhaustion, injury and the incredible mental stress that comes of their continuous labor. The only caveats of this book are that it's a bit stretched..could have been much more terrific if a 100 pages less but still alright, a somewhat pointless googly towards the end (the mechanical rabbit bit, for those that have read it) and the climax is a bit...anti-climactic.

but this is still highly recommended as a gripping well-written book by King. I'm wondering now if I should read Running Man from the same collection...would it be too similar?
 
Go ahead. Running man is a very different story, it's a manhunt orchestrated for TV. Scarier, and scarier, as we see the current trend in reality show.
Again well written. Richard Bachman novels are my favorites among Stephen King bibliography.
 
Thanks Leto. Will do so...although I might read something else first for a change of style :)
 
I finished The Riddle by Alison Croggon on Sat, really enjoyable read, a very nice writer - lovely style :D


Started Harry Potter 6 mid day Sun, got if finished after work today. Really enjoyed this book, it was much easier to read than the 5th one, a lot better planned I felt. :D
 
The Long Walk is a really harrowing read! BTW, I've started out on Stephen King's Hearts In Atlantis, having finished The Calcutta Chromosome Last night. I'll probably post a seperate thread on the latter, if you'd like to add your own views too, Ravenus.
 
Currently reading Steven Erikson's Deadhouse Gates and before that The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula Le Guin) and Time out of Joint (Philip K. Dick), both very enjoyable reads. I've read very few short story collections (apart from Asimov) so I'm thinking next I'll start to remedy that. :)
 
That's an interesting combination of books. The Lathe of Heaven is almost Philio K Dick-ish in many ways, but Le Guin uses those twists in reality to explore her recurring theme of the perils of utopia-building. Time Out Of Joint was one of the first PKD novels I read - not as mind-bending some of the others but a very good book on its own. I like the well depicted small-town setting a lot. This book was written after PKD had taken some time off to write contemporaty literary fiction - producing work that did not see publication during his publication, but did influence the tone and setting of his future SF works, such as this one.

If you can locate the SF Hall of Fame Vol 1 (Ed: Robert Silverberg), that's a great anthology to read. It contains pretty much every essential SF short story written up to the 70s, I think.
 
Thanks I'll see if i can track it down, I really enjoyed Time out of Joint although i found the ending a little mundane/simple? dont know what i was expecting i guess :rolleyes: But first it's past time i tracked down le Guin's The ones Who Walk Away from Omelas :)
 
Time Out of Joint certainly isn't on a level with other PKD novels like Ubik or VALIS, but it has its merits. The Le Guin short story can be found in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.
 
knivesout said:
The Long Walk is a really harrowing read! BTW, I've started out on Stephen King's Hearts In Atlantis, having finished The Calcutta Chromosome Last night. I'll probably post a seperate thread on the latter, if you'd like to add your own views too, Ravenus.
Click to expand...
I certainly wouldn't mind a discussion on Calcutta Chromosome, although I wonder if anybody other than us 2 would be taking part. But it could be good fun.

@Hearts in Atlantis
Good show! I picked that book up on a lark a few years back after I had read the first 3-4 pages...and thinking...hmm this looks like it has potential...but I really didn't expect how mind-blowing good it'd be...especially considering that one assumed King to be in the waning stage of his creativity. It's one terrific emotional ride. The only cheap shot he makes in this is a reference to connect the Brautigan character to Dark Tower but that's just in passing and easily ignorable.
 
ravenus said:
The only cheap shot he makes in this is a reference to connect the Brautigan character to Dark Tower but that's just in passing and easily ignorable.
Click to expand...

But King always self-references, seems to me. Just one is so minimal as to be nonexistent. I haven't read Hearts in Atlantis yet; maybe I'll have to give it a read.
 
Basically, Brautigan mentions the Beam at one point - but as far as I can tell it makes no real difference to the story, and exists mainly to give Dark Tower fans a little frisson of recognition.


King never used to be self-referential until the Dark Tower series really took off, did he? I was inclined to dissmiss him after he re-wrote the first volume of that series to reflect later changes - there's nothing I find more annoying than this whole retroactive-continuity thing that has huge chunks of the comics world mired in navel-gazing silliness, but he seems to still be capable of writing a neat book or two.
 
King made a self-reference in his story Night-Flier from Prime Evil (if you have the original version of the story, that is...he at some later point revised it to be contemporary to the 90's) but that was to himself the writer than any of to his works...in keeping with his tendency to incorporate pop culture references that delineate the time and mood of the story that he is writing.
 
I'm reading Neuromancer at the moment, as an aside to Name of the Rose. I like that Gibson's incapable of holding scenes for over two pages.
 
I read Roadwork in the Bachman collection - about a character who is determined to go to any extreme to prevent his home from being claimed by the government who wants to build a highway through it - and this was another of the really good books that King has written even it's little failings considered.
The one thing that irked me most was King's cheap giveaway of psychotic trends in the character, of him holding mental conversations with his dead son...to me it would have been more effective to show a reasonably sane appearing character go uncontrollably furious and driven unto destructive acts at the situation he is forced into.

But on the whole it is still gripping, concise and much more worth the read than his bloated works.
 
Finished John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos, focusing on Sarah Monette's Melusine, andstarting Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania.
 
I've almost finished Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis. It's one of the most unusual books I've read by King - and easily one of his best. It's a collection of interconnected stories that revolves around the Vietnam war, more specifically around a group of people who grew up in the same town and the ways in which the war touched and influenced their lives. King can weave a really good human story when he isn't trying to up the horrific ante. It's odd, but for someone who is such a great horror writer, and who obviously loves and understands the horror genre so well, he's often at his most ham-handed when trying to scare. There's none of that here, and what there is is a very gripping set of stories.

I'm also continuing to read Nandor Fodor's The Haunted Mind. Fodor was an early 20th-century occult researcher type who was deeply influenced by Freud and attempted to use psychoanalytical principles and techniques in his further researches, as chrnonicled in this book. The results vary from some very intriguing deconstructionist interpretations of apparently paranormal phenomena to some rather overdone attempts to read libidinous motives into strange happenings. Good fun.
 
Ah glad ya liked HiA.
Regards the second story in the book, it was an incredible gamble he pulled off...I wouldn't have thought a story the bulk of which deals with a college falling prey to a card game would have been anywhere as gripping as he yarned it out and then when he brings in the Vietnam thing...it's one of these sad (because of the circumstances of the story) yet absolutely exhilarating moments because you realize what a brilliant thing you're reading.
I cannot compliment it higher than by saying that, alongside The Body it's one of the most intimate and honest things he has ever written.
 
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