<p dir="ltr">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! </p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Mar 12, 2014 2:38 PM, "Piotr Szczęsny" <<a href="mailto:neternalz@gmail.com">neternalz@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">I bump Craigs recommendation!, great start for "Southern Reach" trilogy.<div><br></div><div>"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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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). </div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Anybody read "No Return" by Zachary Jeningan? Many people compare this to the book of the new sun, Elizabeth Hand wrote : "<span style="line-height:22.399999618530273px;letter-spacing:0.5px;font-size:14px;font-family:proxima-nova">It has the sweep of Frank Herbert's </span><em style="line-height:22.399999618530273px;letter-spacing:0.5px;font-size:14px;font-family:proxima-nova;margin-top:0px">Dune</em><span style="line-height:22.399999618530273px;letter-spacing:0.5px;font-size:14px;font-family:proxima-nova"> and the intoxicatingly strange grandeur of Gene Wolfe's </span><em style="line-height:22.399999618530273px;letter-spacing:0.5px;font-size:14px;font-family:proxima-nova">Book of the New Sun</em><span style="line-height:22.399999618530273px;letter-spacing:0.5px;font-size:14px;font-family:proxima-nova">, with a decadent, beautifully rendered vision all its own." </span></div>
<div><font color="#000000" face="proxima-nova"><span style="font-size:14px;letter-spacing:0.5px;line-height:22.399999618530273px"><br></span></font><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2014-03-12 15:35 GMT+01:00 Craig Brewer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cnbrewer@yahoo.com" target="_blank">cnbrewer@yahoo.com</a>></span>:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div style="font-size:12pt;font-family:HelveticaNeue,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,'Lucida Grande',sans-serif">
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<span>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.</span></div><div style="font-style:normal;font-size:16px;background-color:transparent;font-family:HelveticaNeue,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,'Lucida Grande',sans-serif">
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<div> <div style="font-family:HelveticaNeue,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,'Lucida Grande',sans-serif;font-size:12pt"> <div dir="ltr"> <hr size="1"> <font face="Arial"> <b><span style="font-weight:bold">From:</span></b> Antonin Scriabin <<a href="mailto:kierkegaurdian@gmail.com" target="_blank">kierkegaurdian@gmail.com</a>><br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">To:</span></b> The Urth Mailing List <<a href="mailto:urth@lists.urth.net" target="_blank">urth@lists.urth.net</a>> <br> <b><span style="font-weight:bold">Sent:</span></b> Wednesday, March 12, 2014 7:26 AM<br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">Subject:</span></b> (urth) What are you reading?<br> </font> </div> <div><div><div><br><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div><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>
<br></div>I am working my way through the Harvard Classics. I just finished the fourth volume, the complete poems in English by John Milton. <i>Paradise Lost </i>was a treat, as was Franklin's autobiography in the first volume and the <i>New Atlantis </i>by Bacon in the third, which is an old favorite of mine from my philosophy major days.<br>
<br></div>I've also recently read <i>The Sea, the Sea </i>by Iris Murdoch, which was excellent, and <i>The City of Dreaming Books </i>by Moers, which was great, silly fun<i>.</i> I also read the first 50 pages of <i>Lookout Cartridge</i> by McElroy and decided to put it back on the shelf for the time being. It wasn't particularly <i>bad, </i>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>
<br></div>Anyway, I am getting back on a Wolfe kick today by finishing the latter half of <i>The Island of Doctor Death, and Other Stories, and Other Stories</i>. Looking forward to it!<br></div></div><br></div></div><div>
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