I'm sure plenty of people around here will hate House of Leaves but I found it to be quite an interesting book. It's clearly not perfect; The ending was slightly unsatisfying and some parts of it had maddening edge levels. The main problem with the book is the over-the-top use of bullshit typographical gimmickry. The words are mimicking the shape of the house! Nice! Got it! Now maybe stop putting only two words on a single page. The book is actually relatively short but its massive weight (caused by hundreds of essentially empty pages) makes it physically difficult to read. There's also plenty of good though, and I always find myself drawn to overtly self-referential narratives and unreliable narrators.

Ultimately, I get a similar vibe from it and Book of the New Sun in that both books have a totally engaging story on the surface as well as a seemingly infinite network of clues and scattered symbols to piece together. Coming to a total narrative "conclusion" about the work would take multiple readings and a large part of the joy of reading the book is slowly making discoveries. It's a fairly simple story, but an infinitely complex literary labyrinth. There are also some totally brilliant passages and chapters, (the parts about the Minotaur and the symbolism of labyrinths resonate with me in a way that I really can't comprehend) and I feel like it could easily be among my favourite books if it weren't for all the obstinate physical inaccessibility.

Yeah, put me in the "hates House of Leaves" camp. I'm not sure it's my MOST hated book, but if I had a "bottom five" it would definitely be in there.


Ah, I've had Accelerando sitting on my shelf for a while, but haven't yet felt the time is right to pick it up. Despite your reservations, how did you feel about it on the whole? Would you recommend it?

Wow, I'm really glad I gave up on House of Leaves. I tried to read it right after highschool I think.

The Stars my Destination is still the coolest/most creative use I've ever seen of odd typography to convey atmosphere.

The Stars My Destination is a great, great book. I really liked that. Made me want to check out some more old sci fi stuff - most of my exposure is just the regular stuff like old Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Matheson, a bit of that stuff. But TSMD was just a ton of fun and a gripping exciting ride. The Slough Feg connection was what made me check that one out.

Peter Straub's Koko is excellent so far. Murky, immersive, psychedelic horror about a bunch of 'Nam veterans trying to solve the murders they believe are being committed by another one of their own. Straub is really good at crafting these dense, haunting tales that just leave you feeling drained.

I was never a huge fan of the Slough Feg song, but a buddy let me borrow the book and guaranteed I'd love it. He really undersold it if anything. It still kind of amuses me how insanely merciless and brutal the book is compared to the jaunty (excuse the half-pun) little tune Slough Feg cooked up.

It's pretty folksy, but I think the Slough Feg song does fine. Appropriately gritty and adventurous-sounding. It was actually after hearing Scalzi tout the book in an interview that I picked it up. I remember really liking the way the book had this arc of the main character going from a savage to this intellectual, cunning badass - that was fascinating.

Yeah for real. I sold it without even finishing it, it was just disappearing so far up its own asshole. Admittedly I have pretty specific standards when it comes to horror, but it was just so obnoxious the way it kept TELLING you over and over and over that hey, this is REALLY HORRIFYING AND SCARY, SO SCARY THAT IT'S DRIVING THIS DUDE CRAZY, THE SCARY PART IS COMING, SERIOUSLY, IT'S COMING RIGHT UP, JUST READ ANOTHER HUNDRED PAGES AND MAYBE IT'LL BE INTERESTING OR SCARY, HONEST!!!!

I made it a few hundred pages in and that's about my benchmark for quitting a book if I hate it. And apparently a lot of the later part is just empty space anyway? lol


Man I've been meaning to pick up some Alfred Bester, he's quite well-known and well-regarded but I just haven't seen any of his stuff on the shelves of the used bookstores I frequent. Might have to finally bite the bullet and special-order some of his stuff.

Jonpo, I don't remember if I've asked, but have you checked out any R A Lafferty yet? It definitely seems like something you'd enjoy.

I just found it at the library actually. I looked at a used book store and couldn't find it there, but the library had my back.

Yeah, he's one of those authors like Jack Vance who's quite well-known and not out of print or anything but rarely shows up in used bookstores. I guess people who buy his books hang onto them.

I haven't checked out R.A. Lafferty yet but I've definitely read a few things in this thread that put him on my radar. It's only a matter of time. I'm getting paid and a bonus this friday, so maybe I'll point-and-click something online.

Jack Vance and Bester almost never show up at the used places around here, for exactly the reason you said. The same reason I'm not bumping into tons of Into Glory Ride records or Open the Gate records. People who are in tune with that shit want to keep it forever. Wait, are you saying you haven't read The Stars My Destination? I'm about to freak out!

Nah, nothing by Bester, though he's been on my radar for years. Even when I'm ordering online, I'll rarely go out and buy something by a specific author - usually I'll wait until some website like BetterWorldBooks has a big discount and then trawl their discount selection, which usually yields plenty of stuff by Wolfe and M John Harrison and even odds and ends by Vance, but not really anything by Bester. He's one of those authors who has some degree of mainstream status, but not enough to just be available everywhere like Heinlein and Dick. He did get mentioned in an episode of The Simpsons though!

Martin Prince: As your president, I would demand a science-fiction library, featuring an ABC of the genre. Asimov, Bester, Clarke!
Student: What about Ray Bradbury?
Martin Prince: I'm aware of his work...

Hahah that's awesome!

Uh seriously though. Do whatever you have to in order to put The Stars... in your hands. Listen to me carefully: It is as good as anything I've ever read by anyone. You know how much I love Vance and CAS and Leiber. It's as good, if not better, than any of their stuff. It's stunning.

The Demolished Man is another great Bester novel.

I'm enjoying Alain de Botton's "The Consolations of Philosophy". Not my typical non-fic book to read but I was able to buy most of his works (eBooks) quite cheap and thought I'd expand my mind a bit. I admire the intelligence of anyone so unashamedly, baldly academic...

Never read it, but I saw Cards's BotNS comparison and got all sombre, "there's no way it's that good." Just to clarify, did its rubbish rank factor in post hoc hate for being overrated (hard to avoid, I imagine), or did you manage to read it before the hype?

Heh. Kind of interested to hear what's on your and others' Bottom Five list.

The endless tapestry of totally made-up academic criticism didn't suck you in at all? Different strokes for different folks I guess.




Don't set your hopes too high. I liked it, but it's clearly nowhere near as good as BotNS. It engages with a few similar themes, (but then again subjectivity and a completely unreliable narrative are almost fundamental tenets of postmodernism I guess) and the structure is similarly serpentine, but it's nowhere near as dazzling.

Been reading Blood Meridian again. That shit is crazy.

Haha man does that actually sound interesting when you describe it like that? Because to me it perfectly encapsulates what fucking sucks about the novel: it's a bunch of up-its-own-ass lit crit shit THAT THE AUTHOR WROTE ABOUT HOW MIND-BLOWING HIS OWN FUCKING STORY IS. It's a bunch of pretentious windbags talking ABOUT something being mind-blowingly horrifying, while hardly ever actually BEING mind-blowingly horrifying.


Nah these gigantic postmodernist tomes always come with a load of hype, but I've read a few at this point (with a few more on my shelf) so it doesn't really affect my postmortem estimation any. I'd hate the book just as much if I found it under a rock, but I probably wouldn't talk about it as much.

I tend to love or hate these things, with Dhalgren, Catch-22, and Giles Goat-Boy being the former category and House of Leaves and The Infinite Jest being the latter category. It's probably because they're not just dense and wordy and generally up their own asses, but also incredibly long, such that if you find the author's ass a comfortable and interesting place to be a thousand pages can fly right by, whereas being trapped up inside an uncomfortable boring anus is agony after hundreds upon hundreds of pages.

I guess I just wasn't reading it expecting a scare. I was just happy to get lost in the self-referential, self-contained weirdness.



this is brilliant. Thanks for reminding me about Dhalgren, by the way. gotta check it out.

I read it when I had this sort of phase where I was picking up hard-ish, newer sci-fi with a post-human, singularity, nanotech, excessively information technological, superintelligence/mind uploading-related, etc. etc. ..., erm, theme left and right. 2011/12, I reckon. Accelerando is really an exemplary candidate there, as it details exactly that: (Information) technology exploding in the mid-21st century, leading to superintelligent AIs/transhumans, wild changes in the human condition, the solar system being turned into a computronium Matrioshka brain, contact with alien post-singularity civilisations and so forth. Now, I usually read these things to "blow my mind" and not because I want beautiful writing or memorable characters (not that they always need to be mutually exclusive) and that's commonly where they tend to focus. And indeed, Accelerando did things big and it was very cool (it offers an explanation for a milder form of the Fermi paradox as well), while on the other hand having largely forgettable characters, messy plotting and being a bit too packed with peculiar, dense technical and post-modern(?) lingo. Somewhat show-off-y, actually, as I remember. The story is centered around three (I think) members of the same family; father, daughter and granddaughter, but it's hardly compelling because of that connection. They're just conduits for the reader to experience the happenings in three successive phases of the developmental explosion of humanity.

So would I recommend it? Well, if you want a colourful, funny (in both senses), kinda unorthodox (by my standards, at least) sci-fi "rapture of the nerds"* novel going imaginative places... sure. But I wouldn't call it a good story, a good overall package, as it's quite uneven and muddled. It reads more like an experiment to write the ultimate tech singularity novel and cover as much madness as possible. And that could be exactly what it is; I think I read once that Stross was intentionally trying to be extreme with all the concepts and doesn't really believe that it's a realistic prediction of how things could unfold at all.

*It's not that optimistic and technophile, though.

God bless EPUB-it's time to read Gibson's Pattern Recognition again.

One of my favourite sci-fi writers, easily. I'm semi-regularly praising and pitching his work in this thread. Incandescence isn't the best place to start with him, though. It's indeed heavy on the technical stuff what with the orbital mechanics, mathematics and whatnot. I finished it, but a lot of the explanations went over my head. Very cool concept, though.

I strongly recommend checking out his Subjective Cosmology books, consisting of Quarantine, Permutation City and Distress. Insane, amazing stuff, guy's a deep thinker who knows his shit and, as you say, knows his way around words and how to write a story too. Very good at conveying his big, complex concepts and going off on tangents to dissect and elaborate the implications in a way that still feels fun and natural to read. Note that the three books are not really connected or set in the same universe, but deal with similar themes. PC is probably my favourite, but not by much. When it comes to that kind of WHOA science fiction that has you putting down the book regularly just to reflect on what just happened, Egan is a master. Compared to Incandescence, these are all easier digestible, though I guess not exactly light reading either. You might also want to try Diaspora and Schild's Ladder, both cool stories which I'd rate somewhere between the SC books and Incandescence when it comes to the technical side of things.

I have read a couple of his anthologies too, Oceanic was one of them and although I don't know which short stories belong to which collection right now, it was all mostly great, thoughtful stuff as I've come to expect from him.

Read this one?

So .. looks like I'll be hunting up Egan over the weekend.



That's pretty gross.


hoot!

I fucking loved Dhalgren, so I'll look into those other two. Only read it once, though, but it was fantastic. I really like Delaney's work in general.

I needed a break from The Malazan Book of the Fallen, so I've decided to read Stephen Donaldson's The Gap series. So far, so good, though the whole story feels like an introduction. I'm only about 40 pages in though.

Also reading Bill Byrson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Some of which I know, some of which is blowing my mind. Great read, humourous, humble and fascinating.

The first one is pretty great, the rest mostly good (shit's just too long, though).

Oh, and do prepare for some major, incessant, all-pervading A N G S T and an ultra-brutal, utterly merciless setting.

Yeah, me too. Have you read Nova? I very much enjoyed that one as well, felt like a precursor to M John Harrison's Light. Both authors have a knack for crafting really fascinating and memorable characters and scenes, and neither seem to care too much for plotting.

I can normally handle violence but am struggling a bit with the brutal rapes. Most disturbing. His writing is peculiar though, quite colorless.

I recently read an Oscar Wilde short story called The Selfish Giant and now I have a much better understanding of the Fates Warning song Giant's Lore. As far as I can tell it's just a flat-out homage mixed with FW's pulpy flair.

the Elric books make me feel the feels.

Fair enough, I already own it so I'll be reading it either way, so we'll see how my reading compares to yours. That kind of "tech-madness, style-over-substance" kind of thing seems to be par for the course for cyberpunkish novels these days, at least the ones I've run into. Which is funny, because Neuromancer was actually quite focused in terms of plotting, even though its plot structure was fairly derivative of hardboiled detective novels and adventure/sword & sorcery stories.

Yeah what the hell? Triton is like that. I couldn't put it down and when I thought back on it, not a whole lot even happened, but it was really interesting!

I've started Nova like three times now. Keep getting distracted, which sucks. I enjoyed Tales of Neveryon, too, though I haven't read all of them. I really dig his take on fantasy. And Babel-17 was good, too. I liked that character who had the body mod to look like a tiger, but his fangs gave him a speech impediment. I love touches like that.

I really liked the texture and anarchy of Dhalgren, not to mention the surprises in the layout. Great discussions between the characters. His dialogue is frequently good, which I guess is a feature of good character design.

Litany of the Long Sun took a while to get going but man I'm hooked once shit really got going during the break-in (from Hyacinth on I might say).

the whole thing felt like an ordeal that you were right there with, even though I thought some of the writing and detail and action was a bit tedious earlier on in this part of the story. Silk also seems to transform into a competent hero all of a sudden which confuses me, but maybe there's more to that (help from the gods? narration that doesn't let on to some of his strengths?).

First book I managed to finish in a month was Stephen King's The Gunslinger. Pretty dope. I had no idea King could write prose like that. Shit was super intense and just oozed mystery. The book seemed slightly disjointed, but it's a collection of short stories so I guess that makes sense.

Yeah The Gunslinger surprised me too. Otherwise I'd read The Stand (terrible, terrible book) and various short stories of hugely variable quality. The Gunslinger was actually very high quality throughout, basically in all ways - great action, characterization, worldbuilding, genuinely scary in parts, exciting in others, etc.

However, from what I can tell, the story gets worse and worse as it goes on. The multiverse idea works for a bit but I'm really not interested in seeing a bunch of characters from the "real world," and I'm super not interested in reading about a fucking talking animal companion. I'm leery of continuing, lest it sour my good feelings about the first book. Apparently King significantly re-wrote it later on so it would fit with later books - notably making the Man in Black and Martin from Roland's past into the same character. I read the newer version, but I'm interested in digging up the original to see if it works better as a standalone.

I snagged a used copy of the second one so I'll probably end up reading that at some point. Even if it just goes back to normal Stephen King territory, I'll be fine since I've enjoyed what other books of his I read (The Shining and Doctor Sleep). I just remember those books having functional, standard/bland prose and it totally threw me off when The Gunslinger didn't.

I think I remember seeing somewhere that it isn't really until the fifth book or so that it really gets kinda shitty. But who knows.

Finished the first Malazan book tonight- getting paid to read is always a great thing. Spoilers ahead? There's a lot I liked about it- enjoyable characters, good pulpy swords n sorcery action, a huge amount of lore/back story hinted at- but it also lacked a bit here and there imo. I think he tended to introduce new concepts/twists/plot lines somewhat awkwardly (ie it seemed that the main direction of the plot changed a few times after it had seemed to be well established- and I don't think in a good way), the final BOSS FIGHT was really disappointing, the foreshadowing for the next book was kinda lame and felt it was really shoehorned into the last part of the book as opposed to being introduced organically into the story.

But yeah, I still enjoyed it, struggled to put it down (read it in 2 days) and am very keen for the next one. Strikes me that it'd really fit a video game world too.

Other than that, I reread this: http://www.apex-magazine.com/each-thing ... -my-death/ for like the 10th time and I would HIGHLY recommend it if you're into a-grade horror. I'm not particularly well versed in the genre- I've read a lot of lovecraft and CAS but that's about it, so holy shit, getting exposed to some good modern stuff... well, the genre's a lot scarier these days. Absolutely spine chilling, builds up perfectly, just totally fantastic writing. I tend to just come on here and idly chat into the void about whatever I've been reading, but this is definitely a strong recommendation, and it can be smashed through in an hour or two if you're so inclined. Absolutely fantastic- credit to necrotism174 for recommending it in the first place.


final edit: that accelerando sounds great, I love all that post-tech singularity shit. As long as the writing isn't terrible I'm just happy to lose myself in speculative technology in good sci-fi books, so I'll definitely be checking that out soon.

oh, didn't realise it was a Stross book. That's pretty fine by me, I loved Saturn's Children and have been meaning to check out more of his stuff for a few years now.

The series effectively holds onto that "Gunslinger magic" through The Wastelands (Book 3), so I'd recommend at least reading through that if you're so inclined.

Hmm... given that your opinion on the above is close to my own, I suppose I should revisit Catch-22. I more or less liked it but put it away after a bunch of pages, since the language was, eh, quite uninteresting. Might be that the (german) translator was to blame, though.

BTW, hooray (& R.I.P.) for Umberto Ecco. The Name of the Rose is as good as its reputation & the Prague cemetery is quite enjoyable, but I actually like the first half of Focaults Pendulum more. Just the first part, the one about that group of academics and their exploits, very intelligent & humorous writing. The second part (& the actual story) is not that interesting, though...


Something completely different:
Anyone with an opinion on poetry here? I just bought Ashbery's Self-portrait in a Conves Mirror collection for 2 Bucks, and have a more recent collection somewhere around here. Not quite sure what to think about it. I more or less started reading it since I read somewhere that he was similar to Ferlinghetti, which I like a lot.

I gave up on the Gap series. It felt so colourless and bland, very little description and excessively succinct writing. I hated the main character and found his contiuning desire to "break" the main female character to be disturbing and juevenile. I don't think Stepehn Donaldson is a good writer at all.



I've actually read every book Stephen King has written and most of them are at least loosely connected. For me, the whole gunslinger series was totally brilliant despite what could have been trite real-world characters. Having read his other works provided a lot of rather mindblowing context. I can see how people may find the series to be underwhelming and almost stupid (I think King wanted to rewrite parts and edit himself out) but I found the actual final few pages of the final book to be really mind warping. I was taking heaps of psychedelics at the time and it somehow fit in perfectly with my then tripped out mind. The whole series is essentially a closed loop, without wanting to give too much away. I'd recommend persisting for any doubters; its worth it.




Yeah, a good book indeed. The third book, Memories of Ice, has been my favorite so far. I get what you mean by shoehorned though; he isn't especially adept at providing context and backstory; I know he has said that backstory in fanatasy is often done clumsily and he didn't want to do that, but his particular technique is often senseless. In the third book, he introduces 4 characters with about 100 pages to go. The characters had been in the story since the start but he had never mentioned them before. It felt too convenient.

Still this, along with Game of Thrones, is the best fantasy I have read. G.o.T is better, more approachable, but Malazan takes it to another level.

I'd love to be paid to read, how'd you swing that??

haha, well, I'm not paid to read as such, it's more that my particular job the last few days has involved taking a few samples every four hours then returning to my book.