(urth) What are you reading?

Wed Apr 2 04:50:17 PDT 2014

I'm currently enjoying the first of Iain M Banks' Culture books,
Consider Phlebas. No great mental effort required on the part of the
reader, just good, imaginative space opera. I'm having a blast.

I've also just completed a selection of short stories entitled The New
Uncanny. Having got rather bored of horror/supernatural tales in recent
years, this was a rather brave purchase, but one that paid off. It's a
great collection with some really original, off-the-wall stories, by a
mixture of genre authors such as Christoper Priest and Ramsay Campbell,
and "literary" types like AS Byatt and Hanif Kureishi.

Next up: "Home Fires".

Mark

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014, at 05:05 AM, Dan Harris wrote:

I can't do much reading these days, so I've been supplementing it with
audiobooks whenever possible.  Currently meandering through All
Creatures Great and Small as well as Titus Groan.

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 6:19 PM, Antonin Scriabin
<[1]kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote:

  Thanks for the Vandermeer recommendation. I picked up Annihilation
  yesterday and it was quite good. Sort of a blend of the
  investigative horror of Lovecraft, the detached (but still eerie)
  narration of House of Leaves, and natural wonder of something like
  The Lost World. Really looking forward to the other two novels in
  the trilogy, and knowing they will both be released in 2014 is a
  great bonus!

On Mar 12, 2014 2:38 PM, "Piotr Szczęsny" <[2]neternalz at gmail.com>
wrote:

I bump Craigs recommendation!, great start for "Southern Reach"
trilogy.

"Jagannath" by Karin Tidbeck is a short story collection, in summary
it's new weird in nordic countries setting (mostly, not all), very
fresh, disturbing, and yet sweet sometimes. Also the stories originally
written in swedish Karin translated herself, that impressed me very
much.

After that I wanted some very light reading, so I picked up the Dresden
Files, I just started book four, and it's pretty fun, reads very fast,
and it have a rare tendency - the latter the book in series the better
(story wise, style wise, all-around improvement).

As for Wolfe, I read his story "Forleseen", and it was hauting me for a
week or so, made me very sad, but it is a great story.

Anybody read "No Return" by Zachary Jeningan? Many people compare this
to the book of the new sun, Elizabeth Hand wrote : "It has the sweep of
Frank Herbert's Dune and the intoxicatingly strange grandeur of Gene
Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, with a decadent, beautifully rendered
vision all its own."

2014-03-12 15:35 GMT+01:00 Craig Brewer <[3]cnbrewer at yahoo.com>:

I can't recommend Jeff Vandermeer's _Annihilation_ highly enough. It's
part of a new "trilogy" (the others will be out by September), but each
book is going to be quite different. It's the smartest, most
entertaining, and most effective continuation of the "weird" tradition
I've read in years. He learned everything you're supposed to learn from
Bierce, Blackwood, Machen, Lovecraft, C.A. Smith, and the others, and
turned it into something fresh.

  __________________________________________________________________

From: Antonin Scriabin <[4]kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>
To: The Urth Mailing List <[5]urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 7:26 AM
Subject: (urth) What are you reading?

Hello, Urthlings. What are you reading these days?  I haven't been
reading much Wolfe lately, so nothing is fresh enough in my mind to
participate in some of the other ongoing discussions.

I am working my way through the Harvard Classics.  I just finished the
fourth volume, the complete poems in English by John Milton.  Paradise
Lost was a treat, as was Franklin's autobiography in the first volume
and the New Atlantis by Bacon in the third, which is an old favorite of
mine from my philosophy major days.

I've also recently read The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, which was
excellent, and The City of Dreaming Books by Moers, which was great,
silly fun.  I also read the first 50 pages of Lookout Cartridge by
McElroy and decided to put it back on the shelf for the time being.  It
wasn't particularly bad, it was just entirely unsuccessful in grabbing
my attention within a reasonable amount of time, together with being
written in a very disjointed, unique style.  I will probably get back
to it in the near future.

Anyway, I am getting back on a Wolfe kick today by finishing the latter
half of The Island of Doctor Death, and Other Stories, and Other
Stories. Looking forward to it!

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