^ I read The Idiot some five years ago and I don't remember much about it, except that it was the most underwhelming of the Dostoevskij books I read. Finishing it was a challenge Crime and punishment is a lot better in my opinion, so I don't think you'll be disappointed and if you feel like trying something else by D. I strongly suggest you White Nights! It's just a short story but it's in my top 10 books of all time

Here this thread is, somehow couldn't find it even though it was page one, I was looking for "The general literature thread" and the thread title being much longer threw me off.

I just finished Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, and I like it a lot, but I think you need to pay attention to little details to like it, otherwise I can imagine it getting boring. The main characters have such a rigid belief about what kind of persons they think they are and the book does great at showing how that can be thrown off balance and put into question completely. The ending is... odd. Just leaving it like that.

Mark Lawrence's King of Thorns was dope as hell. I read this last year and hated it, but always seemed to keep thinking about it. It's pretty brilliant stuff, really. What threw me off is that the first book, Prince of Thorns is super quick and simple. This one's way more of a slow burner. Basically Prince was like Reign in Blood and King is South of Heaven. Reading the final book in the trilogy now and it's sooooo good. It's kind of amazing how efficient Lawrence's prose is. There really never seems to be a word that doesn't totally need to be there.

Heinlein's Starship Troopers was pretty cool. Not as action-packed as I'd been expecting, but not boring either. My biggest complaint was the military ethics & philosophy class scenes since those seemed like Heinlein just hamfistedly preaching. But I really liked it overall.

"seemed"

good point.

That's some deep cut Lovecraft, but I still enjoyed it. A lot of people consider it the pits of his career, but at least it was constantly entertaining. Still, too many ideas thrown at the wall with very few of them actually fleshed out, not to mention not much of a compelling story. I'd probably rank it pretty low if I was to compare it with all of his other stuff, but I'd say it's still worth reading if you're going through lots of Lovecraft.

I finished the Gormenghast trilogy a few weeks ago, which we were all recently talking about. I have to say I never really warmed to Titus Alone



Having said that, I know that Peake intended to continue writing Titus books, and with that in mind, Titus Alone definitely seems like the beginning of another series as opposed to the end of one.

Now I'm binge-reading Michael Moorcock's Elric series. Surprised I've never gotten around to this before. I haven't read pulpy sword-and-sorcery in a while and I'm loving the hell out of this. On my fourth book in two weeks. Moorcock's imagination exceeds his prowess as an actual writer, but he's still more than adequate, and all of the stories are just so fun and immersive, which what the genre's for.

I just read a few short stories from Joe Abercrombie's Sharp Ends anthology (one of which I had read before, "Fool Jobs" which was still as entertaining as the last time). "Two's Company" has got to be the funniest thing he's ever written, holy shit. You gotta read the previous two stories featuring Shevedieh and Javre to really appreciate it though (and Fool Jobs too, since it features Whirrun). While I really enjoyed Shattered Sea, I did miss the more R-rated First Law stuff he's known for, and this gives me a nice taste of it before his next novel hits. Also, Whirrun of Bligh

I've been meaning to buy that anthology since it came out. Guess I'll have to get it this weekend.

I'm considering reading Sharp Ends; I read all of the First Law, than up to about 1/3 of the way through Red Country before I simple needed a break. He is such a great writer, balancing awesome humourous characters and situations with people you genuinely care about, I wonder if I could skip right into some of the short stories...

Though I've just started reading the Culture series, so I may be immured for some time....

so shirley jackson is pretty spooky.

Re-reading Stephen King's IT. What a novel. King at his absolute peak. When I read this back in 6th and 7th grade I was freaked out big time when I'd be out walkie somewhere and it was getting dark.

Also been flipping through Thomas Jefferson - The Art of Power by John Meacham. Huge fan of TJ and his views on individual liberty and its relation to the state. I'll start that when I finish IT, which is just flying by.

I blazed through around 10 books during my trip to India, most of em not worth mentioning here. But: I read Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and while it had a lot of good stuff in it, I didn't really like it. I finally gave up on Infinite Jest (and left it at a hostel outside Bangalore after dragging it all the way to India) after two or three tries where I get a few hundred pages in. And I powered through the worst book I've read, Ghost Force by Patrick Robinson, a "British Tom Clancy" or something, mainly because I was stuck in an area where there wasn't much to do except read in a hammock and there was two English books to choose between: This abomination and Atlas Shrugged.

Back here in the real world I just finished Donald Tyson's Necronomicon - the Wanderings of Alhazred. Cool take on / "translation" of the Necronomicon from the mythos.

After hearing about the upcoming sci-fi flick Arrival, I felt compelled to read the short story it's based on, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I had already read another story of his, Tower of Babylon, which was very good and I owned a paperback anthology of his anyway. As much as I liked the lucid, extremely readable style and semi-fantastic concept of ToB, SoYL was even better. Short and crisp, brilliant structuring and musings, very much reminding me of the deep literary wow-concept explorations of Greg Egan (Chiang has expressed admiration for him in an interview and I think the two are quite similar in subject matter and writing style, even though Chiang doesn't stick exclusively to sci-fi). What I found particularly impressive was that Chiang apparently hadn't known much about linguistics at all before and did a lot of research while writing the story. Shows. Even though I'm still not sure I buy the nature of the visiting aliens in the story (or at least the consequences of that nature), it's a very interesting thought experiment, connected to and told from a very human, highly effective narrative.

I read two more short stories from the collection, those being Hell Is the Absence of God and Understand. Fantastic stuff, I highly recommend Chiang. Like Egan, he is really good at going on meticulous explorations of various speculative ideas and turning them into page-turner narratives. Somewhat unlike Egan, there is also a strong human and emotional element to his work. He doesn't write much and apparently mostly or entirely short stories, but he's one of the best spec-fi writers in that area I've encountered yet.

I had a go at "Snow" and really didn't like it very much. I liked "My name is red" and "The white castle" a lot, so maybe I was hoping for more of that allegorical, Borges-esque stuff which really wasn't there in that book.

Yeah, that was my experience too (minus the India part). It had that infuriating post-modern utter lack of concern for plot, pacing, or the reader's time. That can be OK if the minute-to-minute goings-on are interesting in their own right (see: Dhalgren, Giles Goat-Boy), but the problem is they weren't. I don't really care about this tennis kid's elaborate ritual for smoking pot, I don't care about the stupid wheelchair assassins, I didn't really care about any of it.

EXACTLY

Check out the same guy's "Tales of Alhazred". It's a really fun read, pulpy S&S stuff - like Conan, but featuring our favourite Arab. My only complaint is that the horror element is slim to non-existent, but otherwise if you're looking for entertainment then surely you can do worse elsewhere.

I recently finished John Langan's new novel, "The Fisherman". The first quarter really tried my patience. Almost one hundred pages about a guy & his friend trying to cope with family losses & shit. I mean yeah, it's meant to set up context for what was gonna happen after, but fuck me I didn't need it to drag on & on & on like that.
However, the book absolutely smashed it when it finally picked up steam. Black magic, cosmic horror, an ocean of grief to drown even the most hardcore of emos, and goddamn Leviathan himself featuring as a fish(?) to be caught for nefarious(??) purposes - man that was awesome. Highly recommended stuff.

Reading me some of Fritz Leiber's sci-fi. It's not a genre I'm familiar with, so don't know what to make of his stuff so far. Everything's well-written, but somehow most is leaving me cold. Doesn't help that English is my second language, hence I have no clue what the fuck most of his scientific terms are referring to anyway.

Mark Lawrence's Emperor of Thorns was really, really good. Probably on par with King in terms of quality, just different strengths. The parallel timeline in Emperor didn't seem to have the payoff it did in King, but there was much more excitement/action/etc. to make up for that slight fault.

Tad Williams's Stone of Farewell was great. I feel like I finally get Tad Williams, as I used to be somewhat bored by him but this book had me by the balls. I seemed to pick up on a few of the more literary stuff this time, like weather as a metaphor for emotion and whatnot. Kinda cool too to see how influential this trilogy was on ASoIaF.

Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End was pretty cool. For some reason had a hard time fully getting into this book. It wasn't until the last 40 or so pages, when it got unexpectedly dark, that I really felt like I was wholly enjoying it.

240 pages to go on the last GoT book.
Been on it for a year now LOL

I read Childhood's End this year and had a similar reaction. I feel guilty about putting down a sub-200 page book with such acclaim and I'm glad I did finish it. The way the plot resolves is haunting and definitely justified the read.

Anybody China Mieville fans here? A coworker turned me onto him via Perdido Street Station last winter and since I've torn through about half of his published works (PSS, The Scar, Iron Council, Kraken, This Census Taker, Looking for Jake anthology) with the rest sitting on the top of my to-do list. His world building is incredible and often screenshots of some of his more imaginative settings from his novels like the Anophelii island from "The Scar" or the Embassy of the Sea from "Kraken" are ingrained in my mind as vivid as when I first read about them. His latest didn't do a whole lot for me (or for many people judging by the reviews) but he's quickly become one of my favorite writers ("The Scar" is one my favorite books I've ever read) and his "City and the City" novel is being adapted by the BBC for a short run in the next year or two which is immensely exciting.

We've talked about China Mieville a fair bit around here and the condensed version of my take on him is as follows: great worldbuilding, characters, prose style. Crap plotting.

The ending to The Scar for example is just such a major letdown, and the main plot to PSS is basically a monster fight blown up into an epic - it should've either been a tight action story, or a longer, character-driven epic. I think his problem is he got too many awards too fast and now basically thinks he can do no wrong. He does some things very well, so it's a shame he does other things so poorly. Somebody needs to slap some sense into that guy.

I would actually agree on PSS. The main plot line felt shoehorned in and both or either of the sub plotlines around the Garuda or Lin both could have made for a cooler thriller. The Scar's ending was anticlimactic as well but I guess I haven't put down one of his books unimpressed by his style enough to not push further ahead.

What's interesting about Perdido Street Station is that he was 29 I think when he wrote it, it was much longer originally and he had to cut it down a lot, and he wrote it while he was writing his PhD dissertation. I like Mieville a lot, however Looking For Jake didn't work for me, and I didn't enjoy Kraken that much (although I could see what he was going for with it).

My biggest gripe thus far would be that he seems to think a big battle scene is essential for a book. With PSS and The Scar it came across as a lot inferior to what had come before, with Embassytown it seemed like another route would have been much more effective when taking into account the theme of the book. That aside, he's a brilliant writer and I love his prose. I can see why some might think it's near-purple prose but his writing gets me hooked. Seems his favorite words are chitinous, vertiginous, quiddity and there's a couple more I can't remember now but they always pop up in his novels.

I'm looking forward to reading his new novella, The Last Days of New Paris, but man, have you seen how much it costs? It's pricey as hell, but it's also Mieville.

I love the Bas-Lag novels, though they are far from perfect as have been discussed a few times, but his other stuff doesn't do too much for me.

Revised recently:

Kipling's darker works. They still carry that spooky, mystical aura, hinting at macabre images without getting obsessive with over-the-top morbidity (like contemporary horror does). Among the best are "A Madonna of Trenches", "The Lost Legion" and "The Bisara of Pooree"

Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" failed to retain the same "deep psychologism" like upon the first reading. The whole reading experience felt dreary and forced. Coppola's outstanding take on the book makes the best use of this concept.

"Fahrenheit 451". still number1 dystopian stuff for me

Re-reading BOTNS. Man it's good. So good. I'm noticing so much stuff I missed in my previous readings.



and some passages that I just glossed over last time are imbued with new significance:



what a beautiful book.

Nice! I just finished TMOD. I enjoyed it, but I think I will take a break from PKD and move on to AF, which is why I started reading ND last night. Now, of course I don't expect it to be on the same level as, say, TTSS or THS or even SP, I still think it will be in more or less the same league. After this, who knows? Think the next book in line for me will be TCATC, that's been on the back burner for a while.

Currently listening to: M - GR.

Book of the New Sun, brah. I thought everyone in this thread knew that shit by now.

the beach scene with the claw revelation was just freaking beautiful, one of my favorite scenes in a book.

I somehow missed that thing with Vodalus altogether...huh. Well, I always knew I would have to re-read the book at some point.



I'm currently working on Dark Invasion by Howard Blum, which is about imperial Germany's campaign of sabotage and terrorism against the US prior to Wilson's entry into World War I. It's really fascinating stuff about a forgotten chapter of US history. Between non-aligned anarchists and non-aligned communists there were a dozen or so bombings per year against the US in the four-to-five years prior to the July Crisis. After German intelligence started its own campaign against the US in 1914, that number rose to dozens in 1914-1915 apiece, plus arson attacks. I haven't gotten this far in the book yet, but eventually there was also the Soviet plots against the US after the Bolshevik revolution. And all of this happened before we even had an FBI, let alone a CIA or Homeland Security; the FBI was actually created largely as a response to these incidents.

When I'm done with this one I'll do one more non-fiction book dealing with World War I: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson. Then it's off to The Book of the Long Sun.



One of my favorite scenes in any book. The ending of Urth of the New Sun reminded me strongly of that scene as well.

Blue Remembered Earth by Alistair Reynolds was nice. Excellent world-building, and for once Reynolds wrote characters I didn't find myself viscerally hating. Not quite as memorable a story as Pushing Ice or House of Suns but for the first book in a trilogy, it did its job rather well.

Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson was exactly what I expected: dumb-as-hell but loads of fun. Really like this second installment of Mistborn and seeing how the world has changed over time and how the first trilogy has become the mythology.

Theft of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan was another dumb, fun book. Super generic fantasy, but I found myself reading it compulsively. All the characters were pretty good and fleshed out too, except for the main duo, ironically enough. The occasional awkward plotting/weird character logic aside, this was pretty cool. This series seems to get fellated quite a bit on the fantasy forums I lurk on, and now I see why.

Done with Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, the sequel to Singularity Sky, which I praised earlier in this thread as a better overall story as opposed to just the dense and ultimately soulless bubblegum post-cyberpunk lunacy of some of his other novels. Unfortunately IS didn't hold up to that and was kinda hard to get through at times (took me considerably longer to finish too). The plotting was a bit confusing and the ending felt rushed. Stross wanted this to be a trilogy, but according to him he'd written himself into a corner with the end, so he gave up on any further books. What also struck me was that he just tries too hard to make his characters cool and snarky, for lack of better terms. Almost everyone is constantly using this super edgy lingo, lots and lots of technical terms mixed with cynical swearing. The dialogue just doesn't seem believable and it makes the characters very flat. Still, if you can see past that, it wasn't bad per se. One thing worth mentioning is an intriguing description of a star going supernova and what exactly that does to an inhabited planet in the system (hint: unpleasant things).

Finished before that: Artemis Awakening by Jane Lindskold. Meh, started out with an interesting setting, but it developed into more of a quest-y fantasy story later on (it's technically science fiction, though). I guess it's a setup for grander novels to come, but somewhat tedious on its own, probably won't check out later books.


Word, I was quite impressed with the world-building too. I think the trilogy as a whole is not one of his best narratives, but it's still worth reading. Some really cool concepts.

Stross is pretty neat- I've got Saturn's Children and thought that in general he does pulpy, entertaining sci-fi really well, with a fair degree of humour and a fairly unique edge. Not amazing but decent. I'm surprised you consider it dense azmodes as that one book at least was very easy to read.

On the Alastair Reynolds note I'd just chip in and say that I really love his stuff. No one does "super hi tech sci fi/fantasy" anywhere near as well as he does I reckon, it all sound super futuristic and it *kinda* remains credible. I love how he treats faster than light travel, for instance, especially in the revelation space series. It's just a-grade space opera that is pleasurable to read and fantastic fun to visualise, and I'd love to see a video game done in that universe.

On a more literary note I just finished A Confederancy of Dunces, and I thought it was fuckin' rad. Very funny, there were a few scenes that sorta got a bit too farcical for me (It's not really my preferred kind of humour) but overall the dialogue was great and yeah, definitely the funniest novel I've ever read, there's just cracking jokes everywhere. Fantastic dialogue, and the Jones dude was the best black character I've ever read in a book I reckon. Highly, highly recommended for anyone looking for something a bit different.

Yeah I read it this summer and I pretty much agree, a bit too farcical for my tastes but really really funny.

Here's a post of mine about Accelerando explaining what exactly I mean. Some of that criticism also shone through with IS, even though the plotting, setting and even the characters were more coherent. Maybe I've simply read the "wrong" books by him. I hear he also does horror, which I imagine is different from his hyperactive sci-fi output. But maybe not.

I'm making progress with The Vorrh again, after setting it aside after the first third in favour of some other stuff. Very unique. Surreal and unconstrained, great expressive writing in a dreamlike world. Fucking weird.

Not a bad book imo. It kinda dragged a little bit in places but Ignatius is an on-the-money prediction of today's neckbeard stereotype. It's uncanny, from living with his mum and stuffing his face to whining about the degeneracy of the modern world, everything's there.

The book is also really touching and sad when you consider the parallels to the author's own life. He killed himself two years after he finished the (then unpublished) manuscript.

Blazed through Fall of the King by Johannes V. Jensen. Glad I read it again, it's the best Danish book ever.

bob dylan just won the nobel prize for literature.

thoughts?

What the fuck

Man I've tried a bunch of nobel winning books.. At least Bob's contributions are only 5 minutes long, roughly speaking. I'd take Hurricane over a long, dreary read.