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So Suttree is amazing and I would recommend you all getting both the audio version and a reading version. The character of Gene Harrogate is brought to life by Richard Poe on the audio version and you will laugh your rear end off. I will be annoying the hell out of everybody throughout that thread and re-reading it with you all. edit: Scribd has the audio version and you can get a free month long trial (and if you threaten to cancel, they'll offer you an extra month... so 2 free months) escape artist fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 20:20
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:45 |
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Gonna get me a nice watermelon and sit down with the audiobook tonight. I suggest y'all do the same.
Help a goon out! Lots of books - horror, nonfiction, classics and more for sale.
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Jul 5, 2023 01:57
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so when I said I listened to Richard Poe's version, I was wrong. I listened to Michael Kramer's version! I am listening to Richard Poe's version on Scribd now and I am intrigued to hear how Gene's character sounds. also: "A world beyond all fantasy, malevolent and tactile and dissociate, the blown lightbulbs like shorn polyps semitranslucent and skullcolored bobbing blindly down and spectral eyes of oil and now and again the beached and stinking forms of foetal humans bloated like young birds mooneyed and bluish or stale gray. Beyond in the dark the river flows in a sluggard ooze toward southern seas, running down out of the rain flattened corn and petty crops and riverloam gardens of upcountry land keepers, grating along like bonedust, afreight with the past, dreams dispersed in the water someway, nothing ever lost. Houseboats ride at their hawsers. The neap mud along the shore lies ribbed and slick like the cavernous flitch of some beast hugely foundered and beyond the country rolls away to the south and the mountains. Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease." I mean come on. Are you loving kidding me? What a mesmerizing, entrancing use of language escape artist fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Jul 9, 2023 |
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Jul 6, 2023 19:33
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it's available on Scribd if you want to do a free 30 day trial
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Jul 15, 2023 01:20
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The Passenger has some serious "Suttree-esque" moments, especially all the stuff with John Sheddan Attached, DFW's annotated Suttree
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Jul 24, 2023 21:28
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poisonpill posted:Just keep Sutteee rolling through august. Nobody is gonna finish this book in a month and there’s at least another thirty good quotes to mine vvv same, I read it in December and don't have the time to go all the way through it, as much as I'd like to. Enjoying the hell out of this thread though escape artist fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jul 26, 2023 |
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Jul 26, 2023 18:02
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I feel like there's something to be said about bipolar disorder (of which I suffer) with the Suttree / antiSuttree; cat / countercat motifs. I'm still mulling it over mentally but there's definitely something there, if only a metaphor to help make the condition more understandable to non-sufferers.
Help a goon out! Lots of books - horror, nonfiction, classics and more for sale. escape artist fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Jul 30, 2023 |
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Jul 30, 2023 22:43
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So before someone said that all of Suttree's woes were of his own making. I'm going to have to disagree with that read. I think Suttree's got a serious avoidant personality and avoiding responsibility definitely compounded his suffering though.
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Aug 6, 2023 00:31
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I broke the tie for Communion. I want you to know it was me. [/Olenna Tyrell]
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Sep 1, 2023 17:41
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Sandwolf posted:You’d better read it and not shut up about it then because some of us were excited for Rocannon’s World!!  I'm not enough of an rear end in a top hat to cast a tie-breaking vote for a book if I did not intend to participate I have already acquired an audiobook copy and look forward to listening to it
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Sep 2, 2023 01:17
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I'm sorry everyone
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Sep 15, 2023 01:49
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Just a heads up - this is available on Scribd, which you can get a free trial of... (cancel the trial before it expires... I am on my fourth month of a one-month free trial. Keep cancelling before the cycle and keep getting extended 30 days...)
Help a goon out! Lots of books - horror, nonfiction, classics and more for sale.
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Oct 1, 2023 23:58
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 fulfillment for TBB's BOTM / King Bilirubin I / reasons of sincere apology: on Communion: The new introduction on the audio version mentions how all his “literary friends” abandoned him because they believed that he was perpetrating a hoax. And that his son was relentlessly bullied, according to him, on social media. Well, social media didn’t exist in the 80s, so from this introduction I can infer that Strieber has stuck to his story, and that his son has also stuck to his part of the story, in the recent years. Strieber has a weekly podcast apparently as well, which may or may not be worth checking out. After skipping the overly wordy new introduction, I dove into the abduction story. Right off the bat, I laughed pretty hard at the part of where he is recounting his abduction and the author asks to smell the alien, as a means of tempering his fear. Since smell is considered the strongest sensory memory, it actually does have some sort of psychological basis in reality. The author says the smell of the alien gave him an anchor, or tether, to reality. But the way its worded is unintentionally funny and made me laugh. He mentions a concept described by Freud – the “screen memory”, a memory that is mostly visual and begins in early childhood, and this type of memory tends to be tied to trauma. However, Strieber didn’t seem to expound much on it. Freud came up with this idea in 1899, 80 or so years before Strieber’s alleged abduction. Citing Freud may have helped bolster his narrative, but I’ve always been under the impression that Freud was in fact a big fraud. So citing a 19th century idea by Freud may have actually backfired in terms of making the story feel believable, at least to someone in the 21st century. Or at least to someone who took a few psychology classes in college and has been resting firmly in his diagnostic armchair, so to speak, ever since. He mentions that he saw four different types of creatures. The first being a small robot of a creature that was inside his cabin. The second being stocky figures in blue overalls. I must’ve drifted off during the description of the other two as I only remember one more description, which sounds a lot like the common description of greys / Zeta Reticulans. I’m not familiar enough with UFO lore and alien mythology, but I know there are books that list a hierarchy of beings. With that in mind, I wonder how the types of aliens Strieber describes compare to other abductee’s descriptions? The Zeta Reticulans, or greys, that are commonly referenced by UFOlogists seem to match with one of the descriptions. But did these archetypes arise from Whitley Strieber’s descriptions, or did he borrow them from previous abduction cases? I’d be curious to see someone do a deep dive on this. Where did this archetypal extraterrastriel first appear in writing, whether it be fiction or nonfiction? It’s like a chicken-egg situation for aliens. The most interesting part dramatically, of what I did get through, was the son’s corroboration of the story. The son’s dream about “the little doctors” hearkened to two other tales of horror for me: Poltergeist, and Stephen King’s Insomnia. Poltergeist came out in 1982, so it was huge when Strieber was at his most prolific period. Insomnia came out in 1994, and it is also a long, directionless, plodding mess that shouldn’t be read, but I have to wonder, did King read Communion and then borrow the image of the “little doctors” for Insomnia? Strieber’s story of abduction, ultimately, to me sounds like a crock of poo poo. A crock of poo poo with a ton of decent enough ingredients, but I remain unconvinced. The disjointed nature of the work doesn’t really lend itself to making the tale particularly interesting or believable. It feels to me like an early attempt at meta fiction. Think of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, a fake memoir written by the author, describing his time as an IRS agent. I get the same vibes from this. But as verbose as DFW can be, I feel like he had a much more effective editor than Strieber did for Communion. Having just read Paperbacks from Hell, Grady Hendrix’s history of 70s and 80s horror fiction, I encountered references to Strieber’s work as well as descriptions of the trends that made certain books bestsellers during these times. I wonder how Strieber’s sales were in the mid-80s. Did they stagnate, necessitating a new approach to his writing? And if yes, was Strieber’s response to dive into a new type of meta-fiction, attempting to cash in one the growing popularity of UFOs? Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM had been around for about 10 years before Strieber wrote Communion. I hate to jump to conclusions, especially when I couldn’t even finish the whole book, but I see an author experimenting with meta-fiction and attempting to remain relevant in a fast moving and ever changing literary landscape. You might say that I already had this conclusion in mine before I started analyzing Communion, and you’d probably be right. That being said, I am still of the firm belief that Strieber concocted all of this. Having not read any of his other work, I am curious to know how it compares to his fiction writing. Are all of his books disjointed and plodding with the narrative? Or is that something that is particular to Communion? It’s not that I don’t want to believe abductee’s stories. I am fascinated by these tales. But I was a Mulder when I was younger but unfortunately have grown to be a Scully in my older days. And I would say that skepticism probably kept me from enjoying Communion as much as I could have. But I’ll give Strieber some blame for the disjointed narrative, too. With that in mind, I am so sorry that I cast a deciding vote for Communion when we could’ve spent the previous month enjoying Ursula Leguin. I spent a lot of time making hesitation cuts with Communion. False-starts that ended up with my feeling distracted and uninterested and wishing that I was reading something else. But I hope it’s also apparent that I did, in fact, punish myself in an effort to show good faith to my fellow TBB readers. Well that was formatted for easier reading on a Linux document but copy and paste sort of hosed it up, so forgive the wall of text. Help a goon out! Lots of books - horror, nonfiction, classics and more for sale. escape artist fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Oct 22, 2023 |
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Oct 22, 2023 01:54
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Bilirubin posted:Done. That was a lot of fun (if a horror novel about gay conversion camp can be called "fun")! I hope you all are equally enjoying this month's offering. That book is so short that I think we could probably get away with having two BOTMs Suttree was so long that it took up two months, right? Well we can sort of balance that out with two books for November
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Oct 25, 2023 03:39
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136 pages, should be a breeze!
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Oct 25, 2023 18:17
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I'm about a quarter of the way through and I am enjoying it quite a bit. Mara Wilson narrates the audiobook and does a stellar job. Definitely not going to be eating spaghetti for a while. Looking forward to finishing it up this weekend. edit: Got about 2 hours left. I would say the first half of the book was much more enjoyable than the second half... escape artist fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Oct 27, 2023 19:40
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Finished up Camp Damascus and I gotta say, that was a really solid book. I liked the ending a lot.
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Nov 2, 2023 03:06
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My jaw is on the floor, as I just finished The Son by Philipp Meyer. I have seen it hailed as the best novel written in the 21st century, so that is quite the reputation to live up to. In short: it lived up to the expectations. A multi-generational epic that takes place during the Comanche raids in the 1850s, the border crisis in WWI and the oil boom of the 21st century, this book reminded me of Blood Meridian at times and East of Eden in size and scope. I will have better, more properly arranged thoughts in the near future.
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Jan 21, 2024 21:38
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:45 |
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^^We'll get to The Son eventually, I am sure. If I hadn't been such an ADHD-riddled mofo, I would've written a better review and campaigned for it. BTW Would love to hear your thoughts on American Rust in another thread, I read that immediately after The Son. theysayheygreg posted:I love, love, love This Is How You Lose The Time War. Highly recommend the audio book - it's not very long (a little over 4 hours), and the narration adds a little something special to an already special story. That's enough of an endorsement for me. I get four hours into books all the time and then DNF them. Enfys posted:I was going to vote for The Son, but I saw that it's described as "loosely" the second in a "thematic trilogy" that starts with American Rust (which I have in my TBR pile). Can it be read as a standalone or should you read American Rust first? I read The Son. Loved it, and then read American Rust as a result. They might be thematically related but they are completely different stories.
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Mar 4, 2024 02:07
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