|
I have my doubts about how faithful the audiobook is either, because having finished the version off Gutenberg, I wouldn't say it featured "violence...and lots of blood..." (Very ending) Well maybe you could stretch it and say the coffin at the end featured several inches of blood, but that hardly seems to satisfy expectations. I wouldn’t have guessed based on the writing that Carmilla pre-dated Dracula, because it’s much more readable. Although based on having also read Lair of the White Worm, maybe Bram Stoker just wasn’t a good writer. Carmilla is also short enough that I went ahead and finished it already, so everyone should check it out. Maybe I’m as oblivious as Laura, but did the book completely drop the issue of: Carmilla’s mother, the mission she wouldn’t divulge, and how she knew the General?
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2022 02:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 17:02 |
|
|
Perhaps I'm being too harsh on Stoker then, but his writing still feels older than Carmilla, which you could've told me was written this year and I'd almost believe. Especially with how blatantly lesbian the story is for 1871, and I'm normally pretty resistant toward projecting sexuality into works (like say, Frozen). I had to go search on Dr. Hesselius, because I'd forgotten about him entirely. At first I thought you were talking about the treating doctor who I don't remember having a name, but his involvement seemed fine so I was confused. So yeah, pretty clumsy and entirely unnecessary. On the plus side, the existence of Dr. Hesselius stories implies that I have more to read, which is a good thing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2022 16:08
|
|
|
I've started reading Phantom World because I'm curious what vampire traits were traditional, and which we created for sake of the story. There were some traits I expected, some that were noticeably absent, some that reminded me more of witches, and one that just made me go "wait, what?" The fact that vampires, or at least some, can only use aliases that are anagrams. Carmilla reminds me of Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque. It's another old book about a mythical monster that got out-shadowed by a successor (The Little Mermaid), and was also based on a "scientific" work, [i]Book on Nymphs ...[/i[ by Paracelsus.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2022 21:35
|
|
|
I seem to have some serious gaps in my knowledge of vampires, since I didn’t know that Carmilla was a popular name or that they had to use anagrams. I guess I’ve been largely ignoring vampires, since the most recent examples I’m familiar with are Salem’s Lot by Stephen King and Blindsight by Peter Watts. The latter being so scientific it’s hardly a vampire other than that being the name used. As to Carmilla, I wonder if it was ultimately less successful than Dracula because of how passive everyone is. Dracula had Harker, Van Helsing, and various side characters that were at least trying to do things, so it was more of a traditional story. Carmilla had Laura, who never suspected anything, much less tried to do anything. And then in the last 10% of the book, other characters showed up and took care of everything while she watched.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2022 18:49
|
|
|
Both of those sound good to me. Mary Renault is one of those authors I keep thinking I should try some day, but who never makes it to the top of the list (mostly the fault of Patrick O'Brian who I default to for historical), and I'm always entertained by outdated science fiction so A.E. van Vogt sounds right up my alley. I'm drawing a complete blank on anything Christmas-related to recommend. I can't think of anything I've read where it's mentioned as anything more than to indicate that time is passing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2022 17:47
|
|
|
I started reading Voyage of the Space Beagle even though it had no chance of winning because I was in the mood to read something light. So far it's been space horror from the perspective of the alien, and by some strange serendipity it lines up with my current non-fiction book - An Immense World by Ed Yong, where I'm reading about the sensory systems of animals like electric eels.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2022 19:40
|
|
|
Luckily I finished The Passenger just in time to move onto something a little lighter like Snow Country. I've only started, but it seems very Russian to me, which might just be because I haven't read any other Japanese books to compare to. Everything is cold and covered in snow, and everyone seems disconnected and doomed.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2022 20:39
|
|
|
The e-book has the same intro spoilers, but it seems like a story where anything that happens is going to be telegraphed, so no big deal. Unfortunately, I can’t read lines like: “It was such a beautiful voice that it struck one as sad.” and “The obi seemed expensive, out of keeping with the kimono, and struck him as a little sad.” Without immediately thinking of Patrick Rothfuss’s: “I moved a finger and the chord went minor in a way that always sounded to me as if the lute were saying sad.”
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2022 23:44
|
|
|
I discovered that Snow Country is a fix-up of various short stories, which explains why it felt like I was re-reading things sometimes with the descriptions. Also, why the ending felt different than the rest of the book, with the chijini fabric digression, then the Milky Way, and the biggest action of the book, all crammed into the last 10%. It’s a book that I find hard to discuss, though, because little seems to happen through most of the book, and I’m not a sophisticated literary person. Like I knew the “good woman” spoiler so I was looking for it, then read it and still didn’t get what it was so significant. I actually finished a few days ago and was hoping someone smarter would start the discussion. I enjoyed reading it, but it seemed to just wash over me without really sinking in. (Uhoh, does that mean I’m Shimamura?)
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2022 22:38
|
|
|
Oops, I quoted instead of editing, so here's a double post. The 372 Pages podcast is reading a Christmas cozy mystery next, and there's apparently an infinite number of them, so that's a comedy option for December.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2022 22:40
|
|
|
I've started If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, and his Italian Folktales did not prepare me for this.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2022 19:44
|
|
|
Based on Snow Country and now If on a winters’ night a traveler, I can conclude that all great literature must begin on a train. This is my first foray into meta-fiction, and the first time I've read anything in second person since "choose your own adventure" books as a kid, so this is going to be quite a ride. The book actually reminds me of Umberto Eco, specifically Foucalt’s Pendulum. Both authors are Italian, but I think that’s just an odd coincidence, since I’m certainly not well-read enough in Italian literature to pick up nuances in translation. Rather, it’s the sense of wandering befuddled through secret societies and bureaucracies, with a smattering of history and book publishing thrown in. Although maybe there’s some hallmark of Italian literature there that I just don’t know about.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2022 18:05
|
|
|
I can buy that. I was hung up on thinking that referring to her as a “woman” was more treating her as a mature adult and dealing with her seriously, which seemed more likely that she would be with him forever (ignoring the impediment of his existing wife), while previously referring to her as a “girl” was treating her is a more frivolous manner. So it just seemed backwards to me. As to If on a winter’s night a traveller, once I got past the confusion of the first few chapters, this became one of my favorite books, although it wasn't Christmas-y at all. I think it even merits a second reading now that I know all of what was going on, so that I could match what was going on in the book chapters to the reader chapters (if they even do). It strikes me as a book that would especially appeal to writers, because in addition to the prescient criticism of generated text, it’s very much about the writing process. Plus one of the things I like doing is writing first chapters of books then discarding them, so I have to respect Calvino manages to build an actual novel out of them.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2022 22:00
|
|
|
If on a winter's night a traveler seems like the most divisive book of the month yet. I almost said the most-disliked book of the month, but I remembered that the book of the month has included a Diablo novel and a NASCAR romance, and at least one person (me) thought this one was great. I picked up a copy of The King Must Die because I want to read it regardless of whether it wins, and I noticed that it's the first of a two-book series, but I don't know whether that should count against it or not.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2022 19:09
|
|
|
I voted for Trinity because I played it once but never finished it. I vaguely remember getting stuck at floating in orbit and decompressing, and I had a skink which didn't help. Unfortunately this was pre-internet so I had no access to hints and I was also just a little kid. It has no chance of winning though. I should have mentioned the skink earlier.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2023 19:56
|
|
|
I ran around deleting letters from things for a while, but then my online save got corrupted so I couldn't continue. Which is a pretty accurate recreation of how my old Infocom games went.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2023 17:29
|
|
|
I cheated by reading this one ahead of schedule. The benefit to having done so is that I went in completely blind, so I got to play the game of guessing whether she was going to go with the myths being real, or mundane explanations for the myths. With the way it's written, it took me a surprising amount of the book to be sure.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2023 23:11
|
|
|
So far it’s mostly been as bleak as expected, but there was one section that made me laugh out loud for the first time in a McCarthy work. When you see a profound passage like “The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will,” you know something good is sure to follow.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2023 18:33
|
|
|
I’m not going to finish Suttree before the month is over, because as much as I love McCarthy, I can't read his books that fast. Sometimes I need a break to read something like Starlight Barking with telepathic hover-dogs. (Which would be a light summer suggestion, but the 372 Pages podcast is already reading it.) Suttree seems like a proto-Bobby Western from The Passenger, to the point where I could see an interpretation where they’re the same person. Suttree also apparently went to a university, but chooses to live deliberately aimless and destitute, and he has a similar circle of friends.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2023 20:44
|
|
|
I just reached this quote that I think sums up the novel pretty well: "But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didnt say so." If I was a more literary reader I might be able to make something of the dualism I keep coming across. There's the "cat and countercat" already posted, then "His fetch come up from life's other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand," then the section with Vernon and Fernon.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 27, 2023 17:07
|
|
|
McCarthy does that to native speakers like me too, his vocabulary is just that vast. He's like Gene Wolfe in that I'll think he must have made up some word, but I'm always proven wrong. Except for obvious compound words like "whoreclown" in "“in upper windowcorners a white hand might wipe the glass and glazed in the sash a painted face appear, some wizened whoreclown, will you come up, do you dare?" Unrelated, another duality reference I just came across: "In the act is wedded the interior man and the man as seen." This is a good book to pull quotes from because, not only does he say something quotable on every page, but it's structured in a way that I can drop quotes from the last quarter of the book and they spoil absolutely nothing.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2023 18:51
|
|
|
Arson Daily posted:His dad is the train conductor living in the caboose right? Or am I way way off base?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2023 18:26
|
|
|
Harrogate also seems like the anti-Suttree, in that he's ambitious and industrious, while Suttree is handsome, educated, and from a well-off family,
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2023 02:44
|
|
|
I've only read the foreword so far, and "neurologists can't figure out what's wrong with my brain" isn't really adding to his credibility. Add in the argument that aliens have implanted false memories to discredit people, and it's like the foreword was added to stop anyone from taking the book seriously.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2023 20:15
|
|
|
I finished the book during a week without internet access so I couldn't post as I went, but overall I wasn't impressed. I had hopes that it would at least be a polished story because it was written by a professional author, but it still jumped all over the place time-wise and read like someone recounting a dream. A lot of "suddenly I was in another room and don't know how I got there" and "I knew the roof was on fire but there was no heat" type descriptions. And having to continually assure readers that you're not crazy should probably be considered a warning sign. Although after thinking about it, I guess I do use language to the effect that "I am mentally competent to attest to the matters in this affidavit" so maybe I'm not one to talk. I liked the last part of the book the best, because that's when you get passages like: "We go from the endless battle of the duality to the harmony of the triad, and then to the mystery of the eagle." I'm not sure what that has to do with alien abduction, but it still somehow seems perfectly appropriate.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2023 00:21
|
|
|
I wanted Contact because I like hard science fiction, so what happened to all the people that voted Communion? It's a short read, so I was surprised to see almost nothing here. To tie it back to Cormac McCarthy, the conversations with the hypnotists don't work as well here as the conversations with the psychiatrist is Stella Maris because people aren't that clever and articulate in real life. I do have to give Streiber credit for being as impartial as he could in accurately transcribing the sessions though, even when he has to add commentary admitting some of the things said under hypnosis are wrong (at least stuff his wife said under hypnosis)..
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2023 04:07
|
|
|
When I was a kid I woke up in the middle of night unable to move and the room seemed bright, so I was afraid I was being abducted by aliens. I was also a weird kid obsessed with reading about mysterious events though, so I just figured "oh so that's sleep paralysis" and that was it. But when you're already missing time and having to buy a shotgun because you think people are sneaking into your cabin, I can see the brain making more out of something like that. Now I want to go read more about childhood mysteries like towns where everyone suddenly vanishes and some houses still have dinner sitting on the stove and things. Those were always my favorite kind, because it was too easy to make sense out of things like aliens (just people from outer space) and ghosts (just dead people).
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2023 22:14
|
|
|
I’m about 20% of the way in and enjoying it, even though the most that has happened so far is a boy selling some raffle tickets. Which is odd because I gave up on Janny Wurts’s Mistwraith at this point because it was moving too slowly, and way more had happened there. I guess I can only deal with extremes, where if a book is going to move slowly, it better barely move at all. The switching between perspectives paragraph-by-paragraph is easy enough to follow along with because Orstavik always identifies either Vibeke or Jon within the first few words of the paragraph. In contrast to the book I’m reading along with the 372 Pages podcast, where there’ll be a disorienting half page of dialogue followed by “said Darbie.” Also I appreciate Orstavik for giving me tacit approval to use comma splices because I noticed her doing it in several places.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2023 18:57
|
|
|
You're slightly ahead of me, and I didn't even read the book description because I like to go in completely blind, but I expect all good books to be sad. Only characters in trash books get to be happy, which is why I'd rather be a pulp writer than a great writer because they seem a happier lot. A good drinking game for this book would be to take a shot whenever Vibeke smokes a cigarette. And a misleading excerpt to entice people to read the book: "He closes the door. At this very moment in time, someone, somewhere, is being tortured. Maybe there’s a torture room in this house. Maybe someone’s a prisoner here and it’s his job to find them and get them out." A secret agent with amnesia a la Jason Bourne, or a nine-year-old boy looking for a bathroom a la Calvin & Hobbes, who can tell?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2023 21:49
|
|
|
Quite the ending, although not what I expected I thought it was being set up for a collision with Vibeke in a speeding truck and Jon in a parked car. On the plus side, while Jon didn't get a birthday cake, at least he got to smoke a cigarette. Overall an interesting little book.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2023 23:02
|
|
|
For lack of any gift books, I'm going to go with something from my to-read pile: Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov. If nothing else, I expect a surfeit of beautiful language to drop in the thread.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2023 20:49
|
|
|
I’ve started Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov, and I think there’s going to be way too much to talk about in this book, so I’ll parcel things out instead of dropping everything into a huge post at the end. I’m not going to spoiler any of this because it’s just past history that Nabokov lays out before starting on the narrative. I guess there’s a spoiler that the titular Ana is dead by the time you’re reading the novel, but since it’s set in the 1800s that’s hardly a surprise. The first sentence of the novel is a verbatim quote of the famous opening of Anna Karenina (“All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike ....”), which is the kind of thing you need to be Nabokov to get away with. The second sentence says to ignore the first sentence (“That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now ....”). He seems to be playing with the tendency of Russian authors to have confusing messes of characters by doing things like this: quote:On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap. This is the explanation of how to keep them apart: quote:The “D” in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen. Immediately after that, he refers to the second Walter D. Veen as Daniel Veen without explanation, and doesn’t appear to ever actually refer to him as Durak Walter or Red Veen. The novel jumps from the family history to two children – Van (the son of Demon and Aqua, or maybe not, since Aqua sometimes thought he was Marina's son, although she was also insane) and Ana (the supposed daughter of Daniel and Marina, although her father was really Demon) – discovering and discussing newspaper articles and pictures. Which is a common enough framing device, except that there are occasional notations in the novel from Ada (i.e., “Hue or who? Awkward. Reword! (marginal note in Ada Veen’s late hand)."). I suspect the author might be Van, but I’m not sure, and it might be like Pale Fire where there isn’t even a certain answer. After recounting some family history for a few chapters, it completely shifts style to a more conventional story where Van and Ana first meet, which is where I’ll pick up next.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2024 22:16
|
|
|
Another Ada, or Ardor update. I can't say that I'd recommend this as a book of the month, but I might as well drop some things I found interesting in the thread anyway. After all the Russian geneology, Nabokov reveals that it’s an alternative-history novel: quote:Ved’ (“it is, isn’t it”) sidesplitting to imagine that “Russia,” instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no-longer-vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! And it’s also a parallel-universe novel: quote:Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had be come nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world. With a bit of science fiction: quote:[S]he felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian “to the devil”) with the banning of an unmentionable “lammer.” And even some magic (or perhaps technology named as magic, I have yet to discover): quote:Rolled up in its case was an old “jikker” or skimmer, a blue magic rug with Arabian designs, faded but still enchanting, which Uncle Daniel’s father had used in his boyhood and later flown when drunk. Because of the many collisions, collapses and other accidents, especially numerous in sunset skies over idyllic fields, jikkers were banned by the air patrol; but four years later Van who loved that sport bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking-tubes, and generally bring it back into magic order and many a summer day would they spend, his Ada and he, hanging over grove and river or gliding at a safe ten-foot altitude above surfaces of roads or roofs. How comic the wobbling, ditch-diving cyclist, how weird the arm-flailing and slipping chimney sweep! The strange this is, none of this seems to matter to the story at all. You might here "teenagers find a magic carpet in an attic" and have a certain expectation, but it'd be wrong, because after he sets out all of this, it turns into a story of under-age incest (oh so much under-age incest). The book could have been set in a late-1800s English countryside and it would have progressed the same. It’s like if Jane Austen had decided to write a fantasy story where every once in a while a dragon flew overhead but otherwise had no impact.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2024 05:24
|
|
|
I haven’t finished Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov yet because it’s too long and dense for me to finish in a month. I’ll finish it eventually, which is an endorsement because I’m not hesitant to give up reading a book. But still, of the three books I’ve read by Nabokov, I’d rank this behind Pale Fire then Lolita. It’s the story of the romantic relationship of young Van and his even younger cousin (actually sister due to infidelity) Ada. Unlike Lolita, where Humbert Humbert is a wreck of a man who if I remember right opens the novel in prison, Van skates through life (at least as far as I’ve read) based on his wealth, looks, and charm. He strongly reminds me of George MacDonald’s Flashman. I don’t expect him to get any comeuppance either based on the tone of the notes that Van and Ada leave each other in the manuscript. Unlike Pale Fire, where the footnotes to the poem told the story, the notes don’t seem to vary anything. Ultimately I wouldn’t recommend it as a book of the month, because while Nabokov can certainly write (one chapter is just a description of the code that Van and Ada used to send letters to each other, and I actually read it), it’s not his best work. If people wanted to read Nabokov, I’d recommend Pale Fire because it’s complex and intriguing, or Lolita because it’s his best known.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2024 03:24
|
|
|
I've never read any Virginia Woolf, guess it's time to remedy that.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2024 23:41
|
|
|
It seemed to shift dramatically with each chapter. First the wealthy rogue, then the tortured poet, then something out of Metamorphosis or The Nose where everyone blithely accepts a reality-shattering event. And in the final chapter I really didn't know what was going on, other than so many exclamation marks. I wish more books used the technique of having the narrator insert herself with commentary like "For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing." It seems like much of Orlando wasn't story, but commentary and extended descriptions tied together with semi-colons.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2024 03:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 17:02 |
|
|
I read Guards! Guards!, but Pratchett’s humor just didn’t work for me. His jokes all seemed rudimentary compared to things I do find funny, like the intricate farces of P.G. Wodehouse or the wordplay and absurdity of Douglas Adams. It’s not enough for me to recognize that “a neon sign powered by magic” is a joke; I need it to go somewhere that surprises me.
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2024 03:58
|
|