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Owlkill posted:In a big spooky/ghost story mood at the moment and just finished Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I know some people think his prose is over-wrought and melodramatic, but I kind of like it for that. He always makes me feel nostalgic. The story made me both feel wistful and sad and also was quite genuinely creepy, with poo poo like the witch with stitched-together eyes. I think this is the first Bradbury I've read that I'd consider horror, aside from The Veldt. Does anyone know of any more of his stuff with a similar feel? norman partridge, dark harvest e: doesn't have the same feel, but gaiman's graveyard book is also a good october read
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Oct 14, 2016 00:38
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Owlkill posted:In a big spooky/ghost story mood at the moment and just finished Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I know some people think his prose is over-wrought and melodramatic, but I kind of like it for that. He always makes me feel nostalgic. The story made me both feel wistful and sad and also was quite genuinely creepy, with poo poo like the witch with stitched-together eyes. I think this is the first Bradbury I've read that I'd consider horror, aside from The Veldt. Does anyone know of any more of his stuff with a similar feel? The October Game. There Will Come Soft Rains, too, but it's a different kind of horror.
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Oct 14, 2016 03:06
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There are like a million Bradbury collections with various mixtures of the same stories, but I think The October Country is what you're looking for. You could also check out From the Dust Returned, which is similar to The Martian Chronicles in that it's kind of a mash-up/rewrite using other short stories.
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Oct 14, 2016 10:14
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I just finished Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut which was my first of his. Really enjoyed the writing style and will probably check out more of his stuff soon. I've heard Catch-22 is somewhat similar so I might give that a go also.
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Oct 16, 2016 18:18
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For what it's worth I think slaughterhouse-five is one of his weakest. I'd highly recommend either Mother Night or Cat's Cradle if you want to set the bar higher.
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Oct 16, 2016 18:49
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Also for what it's worth, I love Vonnegut but hated Catch-22.
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Oct 17, 2016 01:32
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The Grey posted:Also for what it's worth, I love Vonnegut but hated Catch-22. Catch 22 is really good
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Oct 17, 2016 09:15
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Catch-22 is hosed up and hilarious and has some similar themes to Slaughterhouse 5, but it's very different stylistically. If you want more science-fictiony Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan my favorite of his for a long time; if you want more... normal, for lack of a better term, Mother Night and Breakfast of Champions are his best in my opinion.
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Oct 17, 2016 11:52
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Shikantaza posted:I just finished Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut which was my first of his. Really enjoyed the writing style and will probably check out more of his stuff soon. I've heard Catch-22 is somewhat similar so I might give that a go also. I remember Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus being great, but I'm just about the only person I've seen mention that book.
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Oct 17, 2016 16:09
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The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the characters were well developed enough to be relatable, but not unnecessarily developed like some of George R.R.'s characters. I'm onto Under Major Domo Minor next, same author, I'm expecting good results, it's gotten great reviews from a couple of my friends who are very very picky.
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Oct 17, 2016 17:09
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kzersatz posted:The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt. I remember being really pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed The Sisters Brothers. Would love to know how Domo Minor is.
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Oct 17, 2016 18:29
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Finished The Devil You Know by Mike Carey, the first novel in the Felix Castor series. I enjoyed it immensely. Darker than I expected, but since Carey also wrote Hellblazer I'm not sure why I was surprised. It's easy to see the Constantine influence on Castor, down to the trench coat, but Castor is very much his own character. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
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Oct 19, 2016 01:21
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Brian Wilson's new memoir I am Brian Wilson. Anything of Wilson's must always be prefaced with the points that he's alive and he's functional. It's somewhat stream of of conscience. Some parts really capture his quirkiness, some are obviously edited for accuracy. If you're a Beach Boys fan, there aren't any surprises. Wilson currently claims that he remembers a neighborhood kid hitting him in the head with a lead pipe, causing the deafness in his ear; that's a story that waffles considerably depending on who and/or when it's been told. He's clearly in the best place he can be now, but the biggest insight in the book is in seeing just how easily it was to manipulate him (and a reminder of how many people have done so). Worth a read as either a starter Beach Boys book or just because it's fresh Beach Boys material. A handful of other books offer for much better scholarship on the band.
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Oct 19, 2016 03:06
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The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell My first Mitchell novel, and I enjoyed it. The novel--actually a collection of novellas--tells the story of a woman's encounter with a group of supernatural humans over the course of her life. I thought Mitchell juggled the various perspectives and the overarching story thread very well. I also really liked the main character, so that didn't hurt, either.
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Oct 23, 2016 23:57
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just finished up Furies of Calderon, am a few pages into the sequel, Academvs Fury it's been entirely too long since I last read an epic-length medium-weight saucy high fantasy there are some objectionable elements, unfortunately, like Amara and Bernard's significant age gap overall it seems to have solid bones and good prose, if a little predictable in certain aspects I'm having more fun reading this than ASoIaF
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Oct 24, 2016 00:23
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Robot Wendigo posted:The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet are all great books, too.
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Oct 24, 2016 15:01
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Quicksand - Junichiro Tanizaki I read his "Diary of a Mad Old Man" in university, and mostly dug it, if I don't really remember it too well. Found this one to be pretty terrible. It felt like having someone give their repetitive gossip in the driest way possible. I thought it would be more labyrinthine but there weren't surprises. I enjoyed the insight into some Japanese societal stuff but I wouldn't recommend it.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:24
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Planning on checking out Mother Night at some point. There is no God and he is always with you by Brad Warner is the second book of his I've read since I finished Sit down and shut up. This one was trying to marry Zen's concept of unity with some idea of God and though I followed the idea I didn't necessarily come to the same conclusion as the author. Sure you can use "God" as a synonym for "universe" or "reality" but why would you want to? I still enjoyed reading this because of Brad's casual and down to Earth style but it wasn't quite what I'd hoped for.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:43
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I finished Dune just in time for a book club with my friends centered around that book. We had a lot of fun laughing at the book, particularly the emphasis on _____ within _____ within _____, "Ah-h-h-h-h," Count Fenring's speech habits, stuff from the miniseries and movie (the session sparked tangents within tangents within tangents, as someone put it), and how far-fetched ideas like the Bene Gesserit's ancestral memory were. In the end, though, we agreed that it was a good book, and that we should leave it at that and not read the sequels.
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Oct 26, 2016 20:52
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Solitair posted:I finished Dune just in time for a book club with my friends centered around that book. We had a lot of fun laughing at the book, particularly the emphasis on _____ within _____ within _____, "Ah-h-h-h-h," Count Fenring's speech habits, stuff from the miniseries and movie (the session sparked tangents within tangents within tangents, as someone put it), and how far-fetched ideas like the Bene Gesserit's ancestral memory were. In the end, though, we agreed that it was a good book, and that we should leave it at that and not read the sequels.
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Oct 27, 2016 07:08
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Just finished 400 Days of Oppression by Wrath James White and what a  book. He always tends to write socially conscious stuff and this is probably his most hard hitting and hosed up one yet. The ending fell a bit flat, which isn't like him, but I'd have a hard time ending something like that. It's a story about a black guy called Kenyatta who promises to marry his girlfriend only once she understands the black experience, namely 400 years of oppression condensed into 400 days. It starts off with her locked in a wooden coffin chained up in the basement with the heat on full to replicate some of the conditions of the slave ships and gets worse from then on. Needless to say there's a lot of controversy about it online, as it's a very blunt book, and it takes quite a long time to get to the point. Up until then it's pretty much 50 shades of grey with a guy who is a legit psychopath. It's very rare for someone jaded like me to be shook up by a horror book, especially in the genre he usually writes in because it's very over the top, but this legitimately made me feel dirty reading it, which I suppose is the point.
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Oct 27, 2016 14:03
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Just finished Killshot by Elmore Leonard. He sure has a way with characters. This was the first of his I've read but I'll definitely be looking for more
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Oct 27, 2016 22:58
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The Disaster Artist - Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell This pretty much sells itself on being a behind-the-scenes look at The Room, which as most of you probably know is an infamously terrible film that's gained a massive cult following since its release. It helps that its leading man, director, and writer is a rather odd fellow named Tommy Wiseau, who is remarkable in his incompetence in every single role he took on in the movie but still managed to raise $6 million to make the film in the first place. One of the writers, Greg Sestero, had a fairly prominent role in the movie, and also handled a lot of the production side of it, which mostly consisted of him trying to keep Tommy from completely torpedoing the production. I kind of wish it had focused a bit more on the film - it's awkwardly split between being Greg Sestero's autobiography as he farts around in LA being an unemployed actor and then alternating chapters where he talks about the making of the film. I'm not sure what the rationale was behind arranging it the way the authors did - all that ended up happening was that I ended up skimming over the autobiographical stuff to get to read more about the next set of fuckups that occurred on the set of The Room. It's not entirely a wasted read in those parts - he talks a lot about how he and Tommy ended up working together and there's some nice little insights into what Tommy's like in real life. It's not really enough to sustain it though, and it's not really what I was there to read about.
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Oct 27, 2016 23:51
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Wrapped up a couple things: The Terror by Dan Simmons: The survival aspects were awesome. I really enjoyed reading all of the detail he put into describing the 19th century icebreakers and all of the lovely things that can happen to you when you're starving/freezing to death. The supernatural horror aspect was cool at first, but the monster fades into the background and doesn't really go anywhere until the very end. The ending came way out of left field for me, and I thought it was a little silly. It's still my favorite of the books I've read recently. The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson: These books were high highs and low lows for me. I'm a sucker for supernatural romance and the central one in these books hooked me. I had some gender and class issues with the society of the world, and I kept thinking about how much better and more nuanced that stuff is handled in the First Law books, but every time I was about to put it down there would be some amazing twist to keep my reading. I burned through the whole trilogy in a few sleepless nights. The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi: This book had a really cool setting (post oil collapse/worldwide crop failures Thailand) but I was really put off by some of the characterizations. I still have no idea what Anderson is like as a character, what his motivations are or why he takes the big risks he does. I think the pivotal moment for him is when he risks his and Emiko's life on the chance that the somdet chaopraya is going to get off on her slum gangrape show. His greed and shortsightedness causes all of the problems after that, but it's thrown off like no big deal. I don't think it's paced well. The first half of the book is glacial, and then the ending whizzes by. Most of the POV characters barely interact with each other, and there's a character who spends 95 percent of the book going from rape scene to rape scene. So overall not a huge fan. The setting is still cool, though.
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Oct 28, 2016 06:09
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Randallteal posted:I had some gender and class issues with the society of the world, they're written by a teetotaling mormon missonary STEM major proto-goon from the midwest, so anyway i just finished reading the (1608 quarto) history of king lear alongside & against the (1623 folio) tragedy of king lear. if you've read lear, you've almost certainly read a conflation between the two editions, since scholars until fairly recently believed the quarto printing to be a bad copy & largely imported lines from the latter into the former. it's now thought that the changes between them reflect actual revision by shakespeare, probably in collaboration with the other actors of the king's men. interesting bc many of the most powerful & iconic moments of the play are found only in one text or another, and because it gives insight into willy's revision process chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 15:27
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Bullbar posted:Just finished Killshot by Elmore Leonard. He sure has a way with characters. This was the first of his I've read but I'll definitely be looking for more Check out Pronto, it rules. I'm still hacking away at Shardik, which has cool themes and sometimes perks up but is a bit of a slog overall :/
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Oct 30, 2016 13:28
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Butcher's Furies of Calderon. Yay for fantasy pulp.
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Nov 1, 2016 19:35
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The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, a story about WWII in the Pacific Theater. Great characters laid out and overall good look at the state of war back then from the infantry up to the officers. Plot takes interesting turns too.
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Nov 2, 2016 03:47
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Solitair posted:I remember Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus being great, but I'm just about the only person I've seen mention that book. I've read 'em all and I thought Hocus Pocus was one of the his best. I also loving loved Breakfast of Champions and Timequake, so I'm a weird Vonnephile. I just finished A Scanner Darkly and thought it was really good. The SF elements were extremely light and felt a little shoehorned in, not that it detracted fronts the story. I thought the pacing was a little wonky, with the final 1/4 happening too quick. I really liked the struggle of identity, and the whole section with Bruce was really well done and kind of haunting. I also finished Cloud Atlas which I thought was exceptionally well done. I also really enjoyed the concept that every section was transparently a literal story, from Ewing the novel to Luisa the screenplay to Sonmi the government conspiracy to Zach'ry the yarner. I've had a hard time gelling the total concept of what the book is, though, are there any good resources on this one? I'd to love to explore the novel more fully.
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Nov 2, 2016 09:52
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I found and just finished Clive Barker's Weaveworld. Having never read anything by him but knowing he's most well known for horror, I was surprised at how fast paced and fantastic it was. Then I look it up online and turns out it was his second big novel and first not-too-horror book. Still great! I loved how brief the chapters were and they were focused a lot more on the feeling of the world rather than the details, if that makes sense. The tension builds up fast and furious. Not sure who my favourite character was. I think it was everyone in the main cast. Favourite item was definitely Shadwell's jacket, and how it made slaves of desire. Mostly, I just loved how the plot was always moving. Something Clive Barker, at least in this book, shares with my favourite author, Terry Pratchett. A+ would read again. Now to find another Clive Barker book...
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Nov 2, 2016 12:06
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Artelier posted:I found and just finished Clive Barker's Weaveworld. Having never read anything by him but knowing he's most well known for horror, I was surprised at how fast paced and fantastic it was. The Thief of Always never gets enough credit. It's a horror novel for kids with Barker's own illustrations. It's a fast read, and still packs an emotional punch (in a good way) no matter how old the reader is. He has other Magical Realism and Fantasy novels that aren't strictly horror, like Cabal and Imajica, or Abarat, but he's known for writing horror for a reason, and that's how I like him. If you have a Kindle, The Hellbound Heart is only $2 right now.
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Nov 2, 2016 12:57
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The Hellbound Heart also owns bones.
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Nov 2, 2016 15:07
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The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood This trilogy of books is all I've read from Margaret Atwood. I really like the style of writing - the dialogue, descriptions, characterisation, imagery, etc. I read some different science-fiction from other authors in between Oryx and Crake and this book and the difference in I guess you'd call it the 'competence' of the writing is really noticeable. The other thing is that the book is full of well worn out science-fiction cliches - evil corporations, future weird sex stuff, sadistic bad guys, new futuristic slang words, fantastic animals, running man style criminal death matches, good guy environmentalists, etc - it gets a little close to being pulpy at times but the quality of writing keeps it in check. If you told me about a sci-fi book from 2009 with those themes that was written from the viewpoint of some female protagonists I would be expecting cheescake comic book style jerk off sci-fi with a sexy lizard lady on the cover. Like the shite I spent my childhood reading in 2000AD comics.
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Nov 3, 2016 01:44
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The Traveler's Gate Trilogy by Will Wight - think I heard about it here or in the recommendation thread. Solid fantasy series with a cool magic system; dark but not grimdark. It drug a bit in the middle book but started and ended strong. The best thing about it was the level up/power up system which got a lot of screentime in the first book, wish there'd been more of it in the latter books. Kinda reminded me of Brent Weeks' Night Angel trilogy. I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres - the writing was somewhere between meh and bad but a hell of a story. This lady blew and banged half of the 60s/70s rock stars and was friends with the other half. Her conquests included Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, Keith Moon, Waylon Jennings, Jim Morrison, Noel Redding, Graham Parsons, Woody Allen, and Don Johnson. She was in a groupie rock group put together by Frank Zappa and lived at his place for a while. She hung out with the Stones the night of the infamous Altamont concert. Basically, she was around for most of the LA/SF rock scene of that era and had a different view of it all than most people who have written about it. I found it pretty entertaining.
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Nov 3, 2016 14:14
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Franchescanado posted:The Thief of Always never gets enough credit. The Thief of Always gets every bit as much credit as it deserves. Unfortunately it's given to Neil Gaiman.
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Nov 3, 2016 16:03
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Pocket Billiards posted:The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood sup Madd Addam buddy I just actually listened to Year Of The Flood and Madd Addam on a road trip. Oryx & Crake rocketed into my top ten when I read it, I was just completely floored by the story, the characters, and especially the part where Oryx tells her story to Jimmy, which is like a sucker punch of incredible writing. Year Of The Flood picks up on all the events from seemingly disconnected characters and places. Madd Addam marries everything together in beautiful way. I'm kind of annoyed I was audiobooking because there were at least a dozen short pieces of prose that just hit me between the eyes with their brilliance, Margaret Atwood is masterful at it, she keeps you minimally engaged and simmeringly interested and all of a sudden whallops you with incredible insights.
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Nov 4, 2016 23:00
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Selected Unpublished Blog Posts Of A Mexican Panda Express Employee, by Megan Boyle. Pretty much what the title suggests, this reads very much like browsing a random twentysomething's old blog posts. Unfortunately, it's a twentysomething I didn't wind up liking very much. Published by Muumuu House, Tao Lin's indie small press, it has the same kind of tone as a lot of Lin's work - listlessness, self-doubt, a sparse, blunt prose style that at the same time feels wishy-washy in the extreme. There are a few genuinely great entries, but Boyle's day-to-day thoughts are monotonous and mundane enough that I found myself making any excuse not to read more. I found it really disappointing. Empire Of The Sun, by JG Ballard. Based on his childhood experience in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during WWII, this is a deep and grim and oddly sweet story. Survival, desperation, the dehumanisation of war and imprisonment, and the alternate reality that the young protagonist builds in response to his predicament. Ballard's prose is excellent as always, blending the mundane observations of daily life with the warped terror of violence, illness and decay. This is an important book for a reason, and just as gripping and grim as I anticipated. Right Ho, Jeeves!, by PG Wodehouse. My first time actually reading Wodehouse, and it's exactly as cosy and silly as I expected. Of course due to cultural osmosis I was unable to hear anything but Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry's voices in my head while reading. What I should have anticipated were the jarring moments of casual racism, which were abrupt enough to shock me out of the otherwise fun and engrossing prose. The story is typical comedy-of-errors farce, full of miscommunication and schemes gone awry, and Wodehouse has an excellent command of comic writing and the pleasures of language. A warm, feel-good novel, minus the wince-inducing whiteness. The Seventh Miss Hatfield, by Anna Caltabiano. A really disappointing book. A "time-travel romance" where the time travel involves an 11-year-old girl being essentially kidnapped and aged-up against her will or consent, suddenly becoming a gorgeous twenty-something, despite still being eleven. Transported back from the 50s to New York of the early 1900s, she falls in love with the son of a wealthy industrialist - a generic handsome guy with daddy issues. Yes, they kiss. Caltabiano barely goes five pages without reminding the author that the protagonist used to be a specific preteen girl but is now an overwhelmingly beautiful and kind and gifted and intelligent young woman. Gross implications of age-gap romance aside, a line from Garth Marenghi's Darkplace kept running through my head as I read this: "I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards." Everything is explained and explained again, from basic literary tropes to metaphors to each minute pang of emotion the narrator herself experiences. At no point is the author's hand-holding deathgrip relaxed, except for brief moments in the third act, when mercifully things actually happen. Not surprising or interesting things, mind, but at least a change from the drudgery of the romantic costume drama that comprises the vast majority of the book. If it seems like I'm being too harsh, I probably am, and mostly because the premise - a timeline of women forced to inhabit the same immortal role - could be really interesting. But Caltabiano misses every opportunity to be interesting.
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Nov 8, 2016 02:25
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Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone, Stefan Kiesbye The first two-thirds were amazing, but as the characters grew into teenagers the book got a little too rapey for me. I also don't think the first and last chapters contributed anything, I think the author tried to bookend the story--to give it a bit more definition--but really it was just useless fluff. Everything else is a slice of life series of short stories following the growth of a few children, set in some backwater German village. There is a pervasive evil that runs through all of the stories, kind of like with Salo--the characters seem to have no conscience about what they're doing, and there is no "straight man" to keep the reader grounded in normal morality. This also makes it so the reader can never relate to any of the characters, which adds to its dry, insidious atmosphere. Aside from everyone getting older, the book doesn't really go anywhere. To me that's not necessarily bad, the author understands the limits of the novel and doesn't try to make it more than it needs to be. The Croning, Laird Barron Hot garbage, it's about as bad as a mediocre post from /r/nosleep but spread over 200-odd pages. The book tries to have a realistic setting with believable characters, and achieve horror from a steady corruption of that realism. However, the settings are fleshed out barely enough to place the characters in them, and the characters themselves are only tokens. Without good environments and believable characters, the corruption has no genuine horror, you can only point at it and say "oh okay, so this is supposed to be spooky". The author tried to do some pretty clever things, the story is basically that of Rumpelstiltskin flipped in on itself, then in again. Combining an old fable with loads of foreshadowing and a Lovecraft style breaking down of reality seems like an amazing recipe on paper, but Mr. Barron is completely unable to actually pull it off. I'm glad to see you guys enjoyed the MaddAddam trilogy, the first book was incredible. I didn't like where the story went after that, but it's been too long for me to do a good job of explaining why.
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Nov 9, 2016 14:01
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Just finished Edith Grossman's wonderful translation of Don Quixote. Its probably one of my favourite books and I've read three different translations, but this is probably the best one. It manages to keep the beauty and wit of the language without being overly flowery. The treatment of Sancho in particular is good, as earlier translations tend to make him use words that someone such as him would never use. Quixote's assumed appellation is a good example, as older translations called him the Knight of the Doleful Countenance and other similar things. Sancho gives him this name after he gets his teeth knocked out by sheep herders, and it doesn't seem like the kind of name a simple man like Sancho would come up with. Grossman, along with the other modern translation, goes with something simpler: 'Sorrowful Face' (earlier ones go with 'Sorry Face' which is similar in spirit) A much more likely phrase for Sancho, and a much better image, giving Quixote the image of a kicked puppy. It also manages to make the stories within stories, such as Cardenio, the Two Friends etc. not drag on forever and actually be entertaining in their own rights. This is quite a feat as these are usually the parts most people skip over.
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Nov 10, 2016 10:01
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Just finished the novella "Penric's Mission" by Lois McMaster Bujold - I quite enjoy her more frequent self-published novellas that she has been doing lately. This one is no exception - excellently written and an entertaining and engrossing plot. I think it comes as a bit of a surprise when it ends because it feels almost cliff-hangery and somewhat like it just stops. It is a bit telling that the only complaint I have about the story is that it ends, I think. Wonderful read!
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Nov 13, 2016 07:34
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