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It's the start of the Summer so I've gotten into reading again and decided I'd also try to participate in society more so here I am. My latest reads were a mix of science fiction and Revolutionary France. A New World Begins was a condensed history of the French Revolution. A good read if you already know many of the details and participants, but not something I would recommend to a newbie on the topic. As for science fiction I've been reading Solaris, Roadside Picnic, and Hard to be a God. I wish I had read Solaris earlier because I didn't realize how much that book had impacted science fiction culture. The Strugatsky bros books were also pretty good.
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Jun 21, 2021 20:52
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 06:06 |
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jesus WEP posted:just remember, it’s never too early to stop reading dune sequels There. Are. SIX Dune books! Just finished Between Two Fires. It was enjoyable, interesting take on horror in the late medieval period. I think for my next book I'll read either history, The New Roman Empire: a History of Byzantium, or do something I've been meaning to do and start Michael Moorcock's Elric series. Probably Elric because I'm short on free time these days and I can knock those out over a weekend.
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Mar 3, 2024 19:14
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Elric of Melnibone: the Elric Saga part 1, Stormbringer: the Elric Saga part 2 both by Michael Moorcock, and The Black Company by Glen Cook. The Elric sagas were omnibuses combining numerous different Elric books from Elric of Melnibone to Stormbringer. I wish I had read these earlier in my life because, wow, it turns out a lot of the media and games I've been consuming over the last two decades have been basically ripping directly from these stories. Elric is a swords and sorcery anti-hero who is basically the opposite of Conan the Barbarian in just about every way and he gets up to all kinds of swords and sorcery shenanigans while bemoaning his doomed DOOOOOMED fate and the miseries that the world has heaped upon him. Some of these stories were mediocre, some were excellent, and some were just weird (Sailor on the Seas of Fate, I'm looking at you). Overall I enjoyed the stories, but sometimes getting through a story was like swimming in the Heavy Seas. Moorcock's resolutions weren't all that great either, major plot events were wrapped up too hastily and were underwhelming in their resolution. Specifically, Yrrkoon and Arioch. You can really tell that Moorcock wrote a lot of these for magazines and that he had bills to pay and deadlines to make. There is - somehow - an even larger collection of Elric stories in a third omnibus that I have not yet read, but I have no idea how this is going to pickup where the second collection left off given that the ending seemed pretty definitive and was actually better than I was expecting. The Black Company was a pretty good book. It's basically the gritty fantasy war story narrative that GoT tried to be towards the end, but much better. I guess I would describe it as "what if the Vietnam war was fought by wizards?". I'm pretty sure I accidentally recreated this story in a game of Exalted that I ran about ten to twelve years ago, including one of the characters being a doctor-archer. The story is very big on the idea that winning battles does not mean winning a war and both of the 2-ish sides in the book are as beset by their members' own agendas as they are by enemy action. The Black Company is the first book in the volume that I bought, The Chronicles of the Black Company, and I think I will read the next two books in that volume before I go onto the third Elric omnibus. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Mar 30, 2024 |
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Mar 30, 2024 20:07
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Selachian posted:Looking it up on Amazon, the third book appears to be the three Elric books Moorcock wrote in the early 2000s -- The Dreamthief's Daughter, The White Wolf's Son, and The Skrayling Tree. They're very different in content and style to the original Elric series, not the least because Moorcock was 35 years older. As a longtime Moorcock fan, I'd be interested to see how they read to someone coming to them fresh off the original series. Thanks, I'll try to pick that up first. I'm probably not going to get around to this for a couple weeks because I'm going to get slammed by work this week and I'm going to finish the other two books in the Chronicles of the Black Company, but I will try to find some space for it. I read about ten pages of the final saga and my first thoughts were that this was a bit of a departure from the last saga. I was just hoping for more normal - whatever that means - Elric stories, but I guess I'll give this a try after I've had a chance to refresh my palate. edit: okay so I looked up The War Hound and the World's Pain and this is kind of funny. The book I read before the three I talked about in my post before this one was Between Two Fires and I put a bunch of similar books in my Amazon reading list, but I somehow managed to miss your recommendation despite trying to find books that are exactly what it is. So, double thank you for your reply to my post. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Mar 31, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 01:51
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Magic Hate Ball posted:The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard Did you get the one with the illustrations or the non-illustrated? A sci-fi lit professor in college had this as one of the books he assigned and the book store sold the illustrated copy. It was... an experience. Even the paper of the book had an off-putting smell, let alone the pictures of a cervix with progressive stages of cancer. Or longitudinally bisected blow job. Or post-sexual assault traumatized anus layered over car exhaust (I can't remember if there was an actual picture for that one or if was just talked about in the part with the guy who wants to sexually assault a car). Anyway, I used to leave the illustrated copy out when family came to visit so they would learn to leave my poo poo alone, but I gave it to a friend because I forgot to give him a Christmas present and had very little on hand at the time. Since then I've ordered two copies, but both were the versions without illustrations (lousy lying Amazon sellers) and I'd love to find an illustrated copy. I especially love the little blurb on the back about the book's original title Blood and Napalm: export America and the mention that the original publisher incinerated all of the original copies. Not sure if that was true or not, but it sounds plausible. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 22:29 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 22:23
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 06:06 |
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I didn't even know there was an illustrated version! That sounds like a blast. The copy I got from the library was the annotated version from 2002, which was very interesting. Ballard closes each chapter with notes on certain references in each segment and has some fun anecdotes about the work post-publishing. My favorite was that the Ronald Reagan story was apparently circulated at the 1980 conservative convention as if it were a real report from some crackpot think tank, and was taken at face value as such. Okay, so I looked into this. By which I mean I spent 10 minutes on Google. I ordered a copy in 2010 from Amazon and it was not what I wanted. My original, now lost, version was printed by ReSearch Publishing in 1990 and it is hard to find. I somehow bought a copy in 2001 because my sci-fi lit professor was a straight up mad man (only real class I ever got an A). The cover has a picture of a 'visible woman' sort of model and the illustrations are by Phoebe Gloeckner and Ana Barrado. After a short internet search, it looks like Ballard approved of the illustrations, but they weren't in the original and they also weren't in many of the reprints because they aren't part of the original book. However, if you find one I highly recommend checking it out. I guess my only hope is if the book store off campus at PennState that sold me my copy still exists 20+ years later and if I have time to do a trek out there this Summer. Also, Why I Want to gently caress Ronald Reagan appears to be the reason why the original printing of The Atrocity Exhibition got pulped by the publisher by court order.
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May 14, 2024 00:23
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