(urth) What are you reading?

Wed Apr 2 08:35:55 PDT 2014

My favorite Lafferty too. Unfortunately, it was the first I read and the
others I've read simply haven't worked as well for me.

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 5:08 AM, 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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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
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