(urth) What are you reading?

Wed Apr 2 05:20:12 PDT 2014

"I just finished *Apocalypses*, I think it is my favorite Lafferty. Loved
it from start to finish."

So glad to hear you say that bout that book, Antonin!  I think I've heard a
fair number of Lafferty fans say they liked the second novel in the
omnibus, but rarely heard anybody say a word negative or positive about the
first novel.  I loved the book right off too.  It definitely contains some
of his greatest passages and ideas and should be more highly regarded in
his body of work.

To keep things Wolfean (heh), has anybody ever heard what stories or novels
Wolfe may have liked in particular from Lafferty?

-DOJP

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Antonin Scriabin
<kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>wrote:

> I just finished *Apocalypses*, I think it is my favorite Lafferty.  Loved
> it from start to finish.
>
> Small world, I picked up the third Culture novel, *Use of Weapons*, right
> after.  It isn't bad, but it isn't particularly good either.  There are
> some interesting ideas dotted throughout, but the prose itself is very
> simple and straightforward, while the plot is a fairly generic adventure
> story.  I'm sure the cumulative effect of multiple stories set in the
> Culture universe is better than the small view you get in an individual
> novel, however.
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Mark Lewin <mark at marklewin.com> wrote:
>
>>  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 <
>> 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" <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 <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 <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>
>>  *To:* The Urth Mailing List <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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-- 
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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