What are you reading?

[username]

Not really reading related initially but...

 

Have been playing an import picross-type puzzle game for the DS where via the filling in of giant grids you eventually get a picture.  I finished up puzzle #397 of 400 earlier today and it ended up being a picture of a giant turtle... with a few elephants walking on its back... supporting a disc with a giant mountain in the middle.  That put such a big smile on my face.

[AxB]

Apparently they're changing the design of the World Fantasy Award so it won't look like H P Lovecraft in future. They've decided his racism is no longer acceptable.

[Reed]

What She Left by T.R. Richmond. This novel is essentially House of Leaves meets Gone Girl. Which may be the best praise I can give it. Very good jigsaw story-telling. Good characters. I'm still trying to decide if the writer wanted us to think the dead chick was likable but troubled or an incredibly annoying, drunken Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Sylvia Plath quotes? FFS). Which may have been the idea. Personally, by the end, I was more sympathetic to her (possible?) murderer. I mean, it's not OK, but I understand. You had simply had enough.

 

This book should probably be more famous than it is, tbh. It might very well be a master-piece. It probably deserves better than just to be pushed as "The New Gone Girl!" and aimed at the suburban housewives' book club crowd they are marketing it towards. I think it has something. Time will tell. 

[bobholly138]

The missus got me twelve books for my birthday. How I'm feeling right now:

 

Back 4 years ago at Coast Con a long time fan from NOLA had passed away earlier that year. He had a huge collection of books. And told his sons "Take them to cons and sell them cheap." First day of the con stuff was 2 bucks a book. Day 2 they were a buck each. Day 3 was 50 cents each. Then the last hour of the con they were 25 cents each buy 5 get 1 free. I dropped 40 bucks on books in that last hour. Got complete runs of ERB Tarzan stuff,lots of the Wild Cards novels. The first 10 or so of the Gor novels. And all kinds of other stuff. When  heard 10 cent books I was as happy if not happier than the dog in the above gif.

[OSJ]

Apparently they're changing the design of the World Fantasy Award so it won't look like H P Lovecraft in future. They've decided his racism is no longer acceptable.

 

This has been coming for some time... I've always been of the opinion that if they were going to honor a single writer by putting his likeness on the award then Algernon Blackwood or Lord Dunsany would have made a lot more sense due to being so much more versatile than Lovecraft. Anyway, my best buddy, Scott Nicolay scored for short story this year which is cool.

 

I've had a beef with the World Fantasy Con for years and am on record as saying I wouldn't take one of the fucking things now if it came with a check. (There were many years I should have got one as editor/publisher but since I refused to send thousands of dollars in free books to the judges, I was always snubbed.)

 

Anyway, good riddance to "the Howie". It may amuse some of you to know that S.T. Joshi has returned his World Fantasy Awards and demanded that he never be nominated again... You can always tell a Lovecraft apologist, you just can't tell them very much.

[Control]

Anyway, good riddance to "the Howie". It may amuse some of you to know that S.T. Joshi has returned his World Fantasy Awards and demanded that he never be nominated again... You can always tell a Lovecraft apologist, you just can't tell them very much.

 

I love H. P. Lovecraft, but all the reasons I've read for him not being the face of the award are totally on-point.

 

Joshi returned his fantasy awards because of the Lovecraft thing? That shit is hilarious.

[OSJ]

 

 

Anyway, good riddance to "the Howie". It may amuse some of you to know that S.T. Joshi has returned his World Fantasy Awards and demanded that he never be nominated again... You can always tell a Lovecraft apologist, you just can't tell them very much.

 

I love H. P. Lovecraft, but all the reasons I've read for him not being the face of the award are totally on-point.

 

Joshi returned his fantasy awards because of the Lovecraft thing? That shit is hilarious.

 

 

ST is a funny guy, we're actually good friends despite being polar opposites. He's the ivory tower academic, I'm the street punk who has read everything. We used to get together for dinner in Seattle and I'd have a blast name-dropping writers he was completely unfamiliar with. ;-) To his credit, once he develops an interest in a given subject he works his ass off to become an authority on said subject. Me? I like to know about as many different things as I can. He's a critic, I'm a reviewer... ST will take the Harold Bloom approach of telling you why you should like something, I take the approach of telling why I did or didn't like something and if your tastes mesh with mine or are diametrically opposed to mine, you'll be able to decide if such and such is worth your time. ST has never understood that sometimes horror literature is just meant to be cheesy fun, part of my enjoyment of Lovecraft is just how silly some of it is, "Herbert West", anyone?

[BurningBeard]

I'm currently reading "Paradise Lost in Plain English" because I have failed as an academic

[OSJ]

 

The missus got me twelve books for my birthday. How I'm feeling right now:

 

Back 4 years ago at Coast Con a long time fan from NOLA had passed away earlier that year. He had a huge collection of books. And told his sons "Take them to cons and sell them cheap." First day of the con stuff was 2 bucks a book. Day 2 they were a buck each. Day 3 was 50 cents each. Then the last hour of the con they were 25 cents each buy 5 get 1 free. I dropped 40 bucks on books in that last hour. Got complete runs of ERB Tarzan stuff,lots of the Wild Cards novels. The first 10 or so of the Gor novels. And all kinds of other stuff. When  heard 10 cent books I was as happy if not happier than the dog in the above gif.

 

 

Very cool! One of my favorite con stories, (well actually my two favorites) are as follows. In 1989 or 1990 (I forget which) I went to a Westercon in Cali. In those days Norwescon and Westercon were the two Left Coast conventions where you could count on there being more tables of books than Star Trek plates, funny buttons, and that sort of shite. As I always did, I managed to sneak into the Dealers' Room before it officially opened and was surprised to see my friend Terry McVicker standing behind a four-table assortment of books. Prior to this, Terry was kind of a small-timer specializing in Clark Ashton Smith and other Bay Area writers. You would always expect him to have one table with some high-end goodies, but FOUR tables? Unheard of! Taking a closer look it was apparent this wasn't his usual line of stuff at all, in fact, seemed sort of random. I picked up a copy of The Tempting of the Witch-King by Russell Blackford (totally obscure Australian fantasy writer) and was shocked to find that it was signed! I mean you don't even find signed Russell Blackford books in Australia, let alone San Francisco. The next three or four titles I picked up explained the whole story, they were all inscribed "To Terry" with comments like "Thanks for your suggestions in Chapters 5,8, & 12" and "Thanks for pushing this up the ladder as a hardcover!" My friend Terry had scored the collection of the late, great legendary editor Terry Carr. Damn near everything was signed or inscribed, most with personal notes from the authors to Terry Carr thanking him for his editorial work. 

 

The one book I didn't buy that haunts to this day was not part of the Carr collection, but one of McVicker's high-end pieces; a beautiful copy of A Gnome There Was  inscribed to Robert Bloch by Henry Kuttner. It was only $600 back then and I don't now WTF was the matter with me that I let it get away.

 

Second story: Norwescon in Tacoma late 1980s or early 1990s. Showed up Thursday, got food poisoning and spent the weekend lying in my hotel room feeling miserable. Finally dragged myself to the con on Sunday as everyone was packing up. My bookseller buddy, Robert Gavora was in the midst of moving from California to his new digs in Oregon. Now Bob's a great guy, but he's also the priciest dealer in the field. You simply do not go to Bob expecting bargains. We shot the shit for a while and I noticed he had several huge boxes that didn't appear to have been opened so of course I asked what they were... "Oh, just paperbacks I didn't have room to display..." "Oh, so you have to lug these back to Cali and then back up to Oregon? Maybe we can make a deal, my wife's one the way to pick me up in the jeep, so I could certainly fit these in the car." We dickered around for a few minutes and finally agreed that I'd take the six boxes for $100 a box. (Keep in mind, I haven't even looked at the contents, but one thing about Bob,he doesn't sell crap, so I knew whatever was in there would at least be in nice shape.) Fast forward to the opening of the mystery boxes... OMG! Where do I begin? The mint run of Ace editions of Philip K. Dick? The 20-25 signed John Brunner books including his first novel as "Gil Hunt"? The dozen or so signed Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Dean Koontz, and others? The run of Startling Mystery (yeah, missing the two Stephen King issues, but what the hell)... Anyway, after pulling what I wanted which added up to about two and half of the boxes, I sold the rest of the stuff for $1000 to a local bookstore that was only too happy to have their SF section go from pretty mediocre to pretty much of a showcase. 

 

I still have all of that stuff, my signed paperback collection is sort of legendary as I used to do five or six major cons every year and would always load one suitcase with nothing but paperbacks firsts of attending authors, even the really obscure or minor folks. Yeah, everyone's going to get signed books from the big guns, but how many people are going to get books signed by Jerry Sohl, M. Coleman Easton, Michael Armstrong, and folks like that?

 

The only disappointment was that none of the PKD stuff was signed. Dick remains the one major author that I lack an example of a signed book. It's kind of weird because he spent plenty of time in the NW and I was avidly collecting before he became such a big deal, but I just never happened to pick up anything of his signed. (That's the other regret, when Gregg Press started their reprinting of PKD's books they were priced at $3.00 a book and I and many other fans thought that they looked like pretty shabby library editions (which they were) and ignored them. Damn it, if only I could have had the foresight to buy them as they came out, I ended getting all the Fritz Leiber stuff as he was then and still is one of my top-5 of all time, but I completely missed the boat on the PKD stuff. I think that cheapest that you can any of them today is probably $75-$100. ;-(

[Shane]

Finished the new Stephen King anthology. I don't know that I *prefer* his short fiction overall, but there's some stuff here that's way punchier than any of the novels he's written lately. There's also some well tread ground. Need another evil car story? Uncle Stevie's got you covered.

Overall, though, the ratio of good to "bad" definitely tilted toward the former for me.

[Charro!]

Currently reading Zappa: A Biography by Barry Miles. Not as indepth as other Frank books I've read but has a few different stories (or variations on them) I haven't heard before. 

[Greggulator]

Just finished reading "Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist" and "Everday" by David Levithan. I'm a sucker for YA fiction that doesn't involve elf wizards.

You're probably familiar w/ Nick and Nora from the Michael Cera movie. I can't remember if I watched it or not but I probably did. Anyways, the book was a super fun read. It seemed sorta autobiographical being a North Jersey native who used to go into NYC to see pop-punk shows and constantly fell in love with girls on the PATH train home. I very much liked it.

Everyday is so friggin' good. I couldn't put it down. It's the story of a teenager who wakes up in another teen's body every single day and falls in love. It doesn't get into how or why he/she constantly switches bodies. It just does (like Groundhog Day) and it's better for it. Really fun.

[J.H.]

The Rap Year Book by Shea Serrano is good fun read. Are you gong to agree with al lhis picks for best rap song in a given year? No, but his explaantions are entertaining and educational plus he offers up rebuttals by other critics as to what might be better than his own pick. I mean Serrano does a pretty good job gently cracking jokes at DMX with a stick but then turns around and reminds you of some the shit DMX went through in his early life so you can get the point of what fuels "Ruff Ryderz Anthem".

 

It is a good fun read and I can't recommend it enough!

 

James

[Shane]

The Rap Year Book by Shea Serrano is good fun read. Are you gong to agree with al lhis picks for best rap song in a given year? No, but his explaantions are entertaining and educational plus he offers up rebuttals by other critics as to what might be better than his own pick. I mean Serrano does a pretty good job gently cracking jokes at DX with a stick but then turns around and reminds you of some the shit DMX went through in his early life so you can get the point of what fuels "Ruff Ryderz Anthem".

It is a good fun read and I can't recommend it enough!

James

Big time SECOND on this one. Best book I've read on hip hop in a good long while.

I started listening to Dune. For some reason, I always had the idea that this book was way...denser, I guess. It's been a quick, fun listen so far. Not a huge fan of full cast recordings, but this is well done.

The biggest fault is that there are barely audible sound effects in the background and I constantly think it's coming from my car. Almost pulled over this morning before it dawned on me.

[bobholly138]

T2 Rising Storm by S.M.Stirling

 

Got this cheap months back. It is the 2nd in a trilogy set right after Terminator 2.

[Swift]

I'd read some Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but wanted to go through them all now.

 

I started with the first novel A Study in Scarlet. It had three things I wasn't expecting...

 

1. Holmes hitches a ride on the back of a cab

2. Holmes kills a woman's dog by poisoning it just to prove that the pills he has found are indeed poisonous

3. There are 14 chapters in the book. 5 of those chapters don't feature Holmes or Watson at all and are in fact set 30 years previously in Utah and deal with Mormons!

[Jingus]

After knocking his debut out of the park with Ready Player One, I found that Ernest Cline sadly ran into a sophomore slump in his followup novel, Armada. It's way too similar to RPO in a lot of ways, but it's a step down. The entire plot is literally nothing but "The Last Starfighter plus Ender's Game", that's basically all that's going on here; hell, even Terry Pratchett briefly covered the same material with Only You Can Save Mankind and felt less derivative while doing so. Cline's prose is still perfectly readable and he's got a good knack for describing action scenes, but the retreaded plot and a general rush-to-the-next-plot-point feeling of impatience (as if he was writing the whole thing on a tight deadline) leave it as an overall disappointment after the brilliance of his first book.

[AxB]

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville takes a while to get going - for the first few chapters you get an 'is this even the same book?' type feeling. But he brings things together a third of the way in and it starts to get really, really good.

[Randy]

I'm reading The Slype by Russel Thorndike.  I'm really loving the writing style, it flows very smoothly.  Aside from an early chapter where about 20 different characters were introduced.  But even in that chapter, he gives you a small view into the characters, and allows for intrigue about what part they play in the story.  The 2 characters that stick out the most are The Paper Wizard and Boyce's Boy.  I think that is because they feel like they have come from a completely different world than the other inhabitants of the town and live by different rules.  Although, the local police seargent, who comes across like an amateur Holmes, is a great character too.

[Roman]

More books from the lovely missus:

 

Saad Hossain - Escape From Baghdad

Bert Hölldobler & Edward E. Wilson - The Ants

Henry S. Whitehead - Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead

Jörg Friedrich - Der Brand

Mikhail Elizarov - The Librarian

Magnus Mills - The Restraint Of Beasts

Ilya Vinkovetsk - Russian America

Robert MacFarlane - Landmarks

Richard Connaughton - Rising Sun And Tumbling Bear

Mark Kurlansky - Salt: A World History

Phil Markowski - Farmhouse Ales

 

On the subject of what I'm currently reading: I just finally finished Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. After an interesting start, I became disinterested and then occasionally annoyed with his writing. I feel like I had already read all of his stories before, but by other authors who made the voyages more interesting. I did enjoy Ligotti's style at first, but gradually it began to irritate me until it was a struggle to get through his stories at all. Going by his reputation, I am deeply disappointed in Ligotti's stories. I had expected so much more. I will definitely read these stories again in due time, but with enough space in between to let them breathe, and with my new mindset I now have on him. Perhaps that way I will like his stories more.

 

Now to decide what to read next...

[Randy]

I started reading Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabel yesterday.  The writing style is definitely different; there are no paragraph breaks within the chapters.  The chapters are 1 long block of text.  The story does flow well, though, despite this uncommon (I don't want to say unique, because I'm sure there are other authors who write like this) style.  The story is about a retired couple, in Czechoslovakia, who go to live in their town's retirement home.  The home is housed in a former castle.  The title of the book is a reference to a song that is continually playing over the loud speakers at the home.

[Control]

On the subject of what I'm currently reading: I just finally finished Thomas Ligotti's Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. After an interesting start, I became disinterested and then occasionally annoyed with his writing. I feel like I had already read all of his stories before, but by other authors who made the voyages more interesting. I did enjoy Ligotti's style at first, but gradually it began to irritate me until it was a struggle to get through his stories at all. Going by his reputation, I am deeply disappointed in Ligotti's stories. I had expected so much more. I will definitely read these stories again in due time, but with enough space in between to let them breathe, and with my new mindset I now have on him. Perhaps that way I will like his stories more.

Now to decide what to read next...

That's disappointing. I asked for (and received) the Ligotti for Xmas, based on several recommendations. That's despite the fact that Id read one or two of his stories before and found them to be a bit derivative. Hopefully I'll get more out of the rest of it.

[OSJ]

Gents:

 

Allow me to speak on Mr. Ligotti, if I may... I'm one of the lucky 300 that bought Songs of a Dead Dreamer when it was first published in 1984 or 1985 and have followed (and even published) his work since. Tom is very hit or miss and you have to separate the mystique from the writer. He's an agoraphobe subject to panic attacks which has pretty much kept him away from conventions and public appearances (thus the mystique). Not to burst any bubbles, but when I've talked to him on the phone, he usually wanted to talk about the Detroit Red Wings as opposed to literary subjects. ;-)

 

When he's on, he can be incredible, when he misses the mark, he tends to do so by miles.  I find his relatively new theme of "corporate horror" to be well-nigh unreadable, but just as you're about to write him off, he hits you with something like "The Frolic" or "The Last Feast of Harlequin" and you realize what a major talent the man is. Oddly, the writer I find his closet comparison is the Belgian, Jean Ray, a lot of his stories are slight, almost prose poems, but pack a punch and when he really sinks his teeth into an idea and develops it, the result can be astounding.

 

What makes Ligotti so interesting to many is his literary background, unlike many of us that grew up on Lovecraft and Poe, Tom read the old gothics and was actually writing fiction professionally before he read a word of Lovecraft, yet somehow came to the same nihilistic view of the cosmos where humanity is at best a virus. If you like Ligotti to some extent and want more of the same but from a more disciplined writer, I heartily commend you to the work of Mark Samuels. The key difference is that unlike Ligotti (who can get anything published by someone, somewhere regardless of merit), only Samuels good stuff gets published. Another who is even more hit and miss than Ligotti is Simon Stranzas, his first collection was pretty much brilliant, his second was an embarrassment. 

 

Lastly, couldn't help but notice the Henry S. Whitehead collection on Roman's list... Great, great stuff. Whitehead was a minister working in Haiti in the early part of the 20th Century, so his stories are filled with voodoo references of things he saw first hand. Had he not died in 1932, there's no question but that he's be mentioned in the same breath with Lovecraft, Howard, & Smith. I don't know what's in that particular collection, but compare the contents to Jumbee at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and if it's at all close, then by all means it's a keeper. I'm pretty sure that Jumbee had a British paperback printing some years ago, I know that there's a cheap (relatively) reprint in hardcover from Neville-Spearman if you're not inclined to drop $300-$400 on the Arkham House first edition. His second collection, West India Lights is considerably more affordable and with those two books, you have pretty much all of his weird fiction. 

 

BTW: Roman, your book finally went out in the mail today, sorry to be such a slug about getting it sent out. I included a little bonus that I hope you'll enjoy. So, waiting for your assessment of The Resurrectionist...

 

Just checked: There's a hardcover of the Neville Spearman edition of Jumbee  for like $23.00 on abebooks.com, I didn't realize that Wildside Press had done a trade paperback as well, copies in the $15 range. That $23 is an absolute steal, if one of y'all doesn't buy it by Monday, I will, because I can easily flip it on eBay for $50 or $60. ;-)

[OSJ]

 

Anyone want to buy $12,000 worth of books for $20,000? Just thought I'd check. Nice lot, but grotesquely over-priced. It's telling that they show a copy of Donald Wandrei's excellent (and expensive) first collection in the picture and don't bother listing it. I could use that copy of Someone in the Dark, but not for that kind of money.

[Kuetsar]

I read 63 books in 2015. I can get a TON of reading done as a substitute teacher. . . .