Now Reading

Just finished Isaac Isamov's Foundation. It's aged well, I'm looking forward to read the rest of the series.

how to read review graphs on amazon:

Man's Search for Meaning

  On 8/27/2012 at 10:51 PM, logakght said:

Man's Search for Meaning

That's a seriously good book.

I read it years ago and it had a massive impact on me.

The depths that humans go to to inflict pain and misery on one another are unfathomable.

Currently some Lord Dunsany:

what you're reading

  On 8/28/2012 at 3:27 PM, mokz said:

Currently some Lord Dunsany:

fuck yeah!

Borges, Dunsany, Blackwood, Poe and Lovecraft.

  On 8/28/2012 at 9:22 PM, Atop said:

Borges, Dunsany, Blackwood, Poe and Lovecraft.

Yeah, I read through the complete works of both Poe and Lovecraft a few years ago. Also I've been reading a lot of Arthur Machen lately, which is kind of similar. But I have to check Borges and Blackwood. Thanks for the recommendation.

Anyway, I've been a Lovecraft fan since age 13 so I had already read about 95% of the stories he had written before I started my project, but it was fun to read the whole body of work in a chronological order. You can see him developing as a writer because to be honest the early stuff is pretty bad but the good stuff starts to appear slowly at first around the time of The Music of Erich Zann and then after Herbert West it just kicks up a notch and from Call of Cthulhu forward it's just pure gold.

  On 8/29/2012 at 9:28 AM, mokz said:

  On 8/28/2012 at 9:22 PM, Atop said:

Borges, Dunsany, Blackwood, Poe and Lovecraft.

 

Yeah, I read through the complete works of both Poe and Lovecraft a few years ago. Also I've been reading a lot of Arthur Machen lately, which is kind of similar. But I have to check Borges and Blackwood. Thanks for the recommendation.

 

Anyway, I've been a Lovecraft fan since age 13 so I had already read about 95% of the stories he had written before I started my project, but it was fun to read the whole body of work in a chronological order. You can see him developing as a writer because to be honest the early stuff is pretty bad but the good stuff starts to appear slowly at first around the time of The Music of Erich Zann and then after Herbert West it just kicks up a notch and from Call of Cthulhu forward it's just pure gold.

i've never tried reading all of Lovecraft's stuff in chronological order, i bet that was an interesting undertaking. did you include the poetry? i don't think he did much poetry at all once he started writing short stories regularly, but i'm not 100% sure on that.

i've only dabbled in Poe's works, but i've enjoyed the little i've read. i've also been getting into Machen and Blackwood. Blackwood's 'The Willows' is a good starting place i'd say. it's a very well written creepy tale.

Lord Dunsany is a bad-ass -- thank you guys for bringing him to my attention. Downloaded a collection of 51 Dunsany stories for free on the kindle, read a handful of them this morning. Love it so far.

project gutenberg, so much great old materials there.

My suggestion to all of is read James Branch Cabell's Jurgen....

It should blow your mind or at least expand it a bit.

That does look like a pretty good story... and I can't fight with free. *puts it in the queue*

just obtained a collection of Aleister Crowley's Simon Iff short stories...I love Moonchild, so we shall see how he is with the other tales of Simple Simon.

also a first edition of Sturgeon's More Than Human. Fantastic, wonderful novel that you all should read.

Got a copy of this in a charity shop the other day:

Looking forward to getting into it, especially because there was an awesome, cavernous comic/record shop in Peterborough named after it, now sadly defunct.

Right now I'm rereading Beckett, Molloy.

  On 8/29/2012 at 4:20 PM, auxien said:

i've never tried reading all of Lovecraft's stuff in chronological order, i bet that was an interesting undertaking. did you include the poetry? i don't think he did much poetry at all once he started writing short stories regularly, but i'm not 100% sure on that.

 

i've only dabbled in Poe's works, but i've enjoyed the little i've read. i've also been getting into Machen and Blackwood. Blackwood's 'The Willows' is a good starting place i'd say. it's a very well written creepy tale.

I only read the stories and the Fungi from Yuggoth which is pretty bad-ass poetry. You can read it in full in here for example.

My favorite Poe story is probably the Tell-tale Heart. The mood and the insanity are just perfect.

I found the 1Q84 trilogy put together in a neat "little" book, and I remember some vaguely positive post about it in this very thread so I purchased it. Just a few chapters in so we'll see how good it is.

"If not now, when?" by Primo Levi. 3 chapters in. picked this up from the bookshelf on a whim. absolutely glad i did. wasn't expecting too much. effortlessly readable. immediate empathy with the central characters. beautifully written. some of the most evocative descriptive storytelling i've ever come across.

Cloud Atlas.

Yes I picked it up because of the thread on here.

Just had a mad urge to read an Iris Murdoch novel, so I ordered The Sea, The Sea from Amazon. £2.61 delivered. Amazon do it again!

I've actually read very few of her novels but I thought The Bell was brilliant. An Unofficial Rose not so much. But I'm expecting good things from this one.

Iain, sometime you should check out Canetti's "Part in the Blitz" for his devastating comments about Iris Murdoch. More of a literary curiosity really but all the same worth reading, nothing like a bit of harsh high brow gossip! I'm not a fan of hers and had the pleasure of relishing a bit in his tales about her, so perhaps I'm a bit biased...

Currently on a picaresque binge: now reading Smollet's Adventures of Roderick Random after having read Gil Blas, Tome Jones, and Larazillo des Tormes. Great stuff! I recommend them all.

finished Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde yesterday. Not bad, glad I read it.

Vernon God Little, it broke my idea to read every Booker Prize winner, sub-Bukowski tosh and I don't like him much either. Probably go for some Ian McEwan next.

  On 8/30/2012 at 9:48 PM, chimera slot mom said:

I found the 1Q84 trilogy put together in a neat "little" book, and I remember some vaguely positive post about it in this very thread so I purchased it. Just a few chapters in so we'll see how good it is.

I recently read that (in the single-volume edition too). Pretty good, I enjoyed it a lot. It's no Wind-up Bird, but definitely along the same lines. A good editor could definitely have shaved 100-200 pages however...

  On 8/31/2012 at 7:55 AM, chenGOD said:

Cloud Atlas.

Yes I picked it up because of the thread on here.

I was thinking of getting this too (not because of any watmm thread though)...

I've been trying to remember the title of a book since forever, maybe you can help. google-fu didn't do the job.

The book is set in a dystopian future and about the only details I can remember is that everyone's kinda depressed and suicidal, there's a particular type of people that suicide by running until they drop dead, also a library is somewhat important to the plot but i don't remember much as to why I think the main character hides there or something. rings any bells?