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<html><head><title></title><style type="text/css"><!-- body{padding:1ex;margin:0;font-family:sans-serif;font-size:small}a[href]{color:-moz-hyperlinktext!important;text-decoration:-moz-anchor-decoration}blockquote{margin:0;border-left:2px solid #144fae;padding-left:1em}blockquote blockquote{border-color:#006312}blockquote blockquote blockquote{border-color:#540000} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: medium;" dir="ltr"><div>De-lurking to say that I, too, am on a bit of a Lafferty drive at the moment, having just acquired <em>Fourth Mansions </em>and the collection <em>Does Anyone Else Have Something to Add? </em>I really enjoyed <em>Past Master </em>a couple of years back and I'm looking forward to reading more Lafferty. Hard to get hold of in the UK though.</div>
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<div>DOJP has written a few great reviews of his Lafferty explorations on his blog recently, which I note that he's too modest to mention here :)</div>
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<div><a href="http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/">http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/</a></div>
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<div>Cheers,</div>
<div>Mark</div>
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<div>On Wed, Mar 12, 2014, at 01:58 PM, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen wrote:</div>
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<div dir="ltr">Just finished R. A. Lafferty's late novel <span style="font-style: italic;">Serpent's Egg</span> (1987) last week - mad brilliance as always. (Read John Williams's <span style="font-style: italic;">Butcher's Crossing</span> just before that - existential buffalo hunting, ya can't beat that.) Reading the stories in the new Centipede Press volume 1 of Lafferty's complete short stories - whenever I have the chance to sit down and carefully handle the book (as I usually have books thrust in a backpack getting bent up as I read them all over the place in between everything). Have already read all those stories, but hugely enjoying revisiting them, especially in a quality physical format worthy of them.
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<div>Realised I hadn't finished the last 30 or so pages of King's <span style="font-style: italic;">Salem's Lot</span>, so gonna round that out.</div>
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<div>Recently read a 200 page poem from the Middle Ages called <span style="font-style: italic;">Piers Plowman</span> (14th c.) - it was for a course I'm in. <span style="font-style: italic;">Paradise Lost</span> is one of my all time fave long poems and <span style="font-style: italic;">Piers </span>has probably shot right up there with it. The latter actually makes a very interesting contrast to the former in just about every respect. (And to be reductively categorical, I'd say Wolfe is more Milton while Lafferty is more <span style="font-style: italic;">Piers</span> - the former 'high' and the latter 'low', both genius and both all-encompassing and stretching imagination to its limits, each in its respective way).</div>
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<div>Really torn about what novel to get into next. Thinking of another King just for simple fun. Maybe Wolfe's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Sorcerer's House</span> - that's the next one up for me in the post-2000 novels I haven't read. Maybe McCarthy, maybe Michael Bishop, maybe Dan Simmons... I dunno.</div>
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<div>-DOJP</div>
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<div class="me30794gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 1:26 PM, Antonin Scriabin <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kierkegaurdian@gmail.com" target="_blank">kierkegaurdian@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:
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<div>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.<br />
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I am working my way through the Harvard Classics. I just finished the fourth volume, the complete poems in English by John Milton. <span style="font-style: italic;">Paradise Lost </span>was a treat, as was Franklin's autobiography in the first volume and the <span style="font-style: italic;">New Atlantis </span>by Bacon in the third, which is an old favorite of mine from my philosophy major days.<br />
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I've also recently read <span style="font-style: italic;">The Sea, the Sea </span>by Iris Murdoch, which was excellent, and <span style="font-style: italic;">The City of Dreaming Books </span>by Moers, which was great, silly fun<span style="font-style: italic;">.</span> I also read the first 50 pages of <span style="font-style: italic;">Lookout Cartridge</span> by McElroy and decided to put it back on the shelf for the time being. It wasn't particularly <span style="font-style: italic;">bad, </span>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.<br />
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Anyway, I am getting back on a Wolfe kick today by finishing the latter half of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Island of Doctor Death, and Other Stories, and Other Stories</span>. Looking forward to it!</div>
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Daniel Otto Jack Petersen</div>
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