Read a few things recently.

Communities of Violence by David Nirenberg. Really cool book. It was written by a Jewish historian who wanted to push back against the Holocaust-oriented narratives of histories of the persecution of minorities, about how a society of intolerance leads inexorably and inevitably to genocide. Instead of this simplistic structural view, Nirenberg advances a combination of incidental and structural forces as the explanatory variables in instances of violence. This book is focused mainly on the Crown of Aragon. I found the chapter on the Shepherds' crusade of 1320 to be a particularly good example of these structural and incidental factors, where he contrasts wildly different outcomes in the kingdoms of France and Aragon despite similar prejudice existing in each. Really interesting stuff from a very well respected historian.

Analyzing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis by John Richardson. Never had any schooling in discourse analysis or linguistics so while this was intended as an introductory text, it was still a little hard to wrap my head around some of it. I made the mistake thinking critical discourse analysis was the same thing as discourse analysis. CDA is DA but with a focus on power differentials. This was incidentally really helpful for a paper I was writing. For the most part it was well written, but I found his "critiques" of capitalism tiresome. "Profit means workers are exploited!!" Yeah OK dude. Interesting stuff in some ways, but I felt some of his examples were questionable when he got into the case studies of the coverage of the Iraq War.

The Seven Secrets of Germany by David Audretsch. This book is about how Germany went from an economic slump after the reunification with East Germany to one of the world's economic powerhouses. Coming from an econ background I feel this book was lacking in many ways. I wonder if it might be because this book is intended for people without any knowledge of economics, but his evidence is kinda shaky in many ways. He has a tendency to use "oh it's the culture" as an explanation for almost anything related to Germany's economy and I was hoping for more concrete evidence. Some interesting things to think about, but not a great book.

Finally I'm reading Kingsnorth's The Wake. It's a fictional story set after the Norman invasion of England and the main character is a landowner who is thrown into the midst of the unfolding chaos that takes place during this period. It's written in this blend of Old English and modern English that the author made himself. This makes it actually pretty hard to read but I'm having success pronouncing words in what I imagine as a sort of Scottish accent. I'm not far into it yet but I think the made up language is kinda cool, but the use of "fucking" (fuccan) just throws me.

I tried to read The Road not too long after it came out. It was my first McCarthy and I liked the tone of it but couldn't get used to his punctuation style, then I got distracted by something (probably schoolwork) and never picked it back up. I'll give him another go eventually but perhaps with Blood Meridian instead, as I've got that one too and can't seem to find my copy of road.

My usual "problem" of having so much nonfiction laying around I haven't read that I don't know where to start is now compounded by a correspondence in fiction, as I recently discovered a major bookstore in a nearby town I didn't know was there. When I finish Gravity's Rainbow I've got all of the following to choose from on my table:

Left Hand of Darkness
The Forever War
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Peace
Blood Meridian

in addition to about thrice that many nonfiction books (mostly espionage histories). I don't know too much about the first three but I know by reputation that the last one will be weighty, I've read enough Wolfe to know the fourth will be dense, and the book I'm reading now is a labyrinth masked as a hallucination by way of metaphors. My mind might require a lighter read before I take another stab at McCarthy.

Hah, I've actually read all of those novels. The Forever War might be a good place to start, just because it's by far the shortest and quickest. The others are all, unfortunately, very long and/or dense. If I had to rank them in terms of ease of reading, I'd say:

The Forever War
The Left Hand of Darkness
Peace
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Blood Meridian

Not as a reflection of quality or depth or anything, that's just how quickly I got through them/how much effort I had to expend. One caveat is that Peace is a book that may actually require re-reading, rather than just benefiting from it.

Cheers for the density ranking . I actually just realized I also have American Gods here as well, though I know that isn't that popular around here. It was cheap, on sale, and I've never read anything by him, so I figured I'd give it a go.

Well fuck you then!

that bad heh? It's too long to read after this monstrosity anyway, so I'll probably start with Forever War.


First I need to actually get through GR though. Significant progress just now, which for this book means about 50 pages in a week. Onto the second part, seduction and intrigue in Mediterranean France. The meaning of the title, rocket mysticism, a seance, "as the mustache waxes, so Slothrop waxes the mustache," and...was that a rape or was it just the weirdest foreplay ever? And since she's a spy who's supposed to sleep with him, would it really be rape if he thought it was rape and she was just playing the part of a spy? Also, the easiest way to introduce a lady spy to the male suspect in a honey trap is apparently to dress a man like an octopus and have him attack her on the beach, because what in the actual fuck.

Right now my copy of Gravity's Rainbow is doing a really good job of holding down one of my shelves.

I haven't read Forever War but I just read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year which was great sci-fi without actually reading very much like a sci-fi novel. Good, thought provoking stuff, I've been meaning to grab more Le Guin after that.

Blood Meridian is far and away one of the best novels you could ever hope to read, as many in this thread will tell you. You could do a lot worse than any McCarthy book, but that's still his best. Just a couple hours ago I was in a local bookstore and saw someone with The Road in their hand and stopped them to ask if they'd read any other McCarthy. They hadn't, so I said that if he liked that one, which I promised him he would, then to check out Blood Meridian next. It really is the kind of book that makes you want to grab strangers by the lapels and tell them about.

If you actually do finish Gravity's Rainbow, then almost anything outside of William Gaddis or Finnegans Wake will seem like a rejuvenating breath of air. Some people find McCarthy's terse style and (lack of) punctuation confusing, but it's pretty easy to follow once you get used to it. Basically his style is an evolution of Hemingway's, but I like McCarthy a lot more.

You just don't get this kind of stuff from Hemingway books:



or



I've scarcely been more captivated by a book than I was reading BM for the first time, and I got even more out of it the second time. It's one that stays with you forever.

Yep, I really hated the punctuation stuff.

Leibowitz is one of my favorite novels, pretty great. Left Hand of Darkness is also great. Both impacted me in my late teens/early 20s.



You should probably avoid CDA if you aren't interested in anti-capitalism a lot of it is inspired by Foucault. Foucauldian discourse analysis and CDA are used kinda interchangeably sometimes. One of the profs in my grad program is a DA guy (Neill Korobov), although he's more on the conversation analysis side of the spectrum than the CDA side, CDA being more interested in broad social discourses and yeah power structures like you said than what people are doing when they're talking. But yeah one of the criticisms of CDA from CA/DA folks is that it's not rigorously empirically grounded enough. That's boring to me, but I get it.

What inspired you to read it/what paper were you writing/what are you studying? Was surprised to come across someone talking about DA here! I thought about doing a CDA style thesis briefly, but eh. I might try to include some of that stuff in my dissertation though.

Because of all the McCarthy talk, I bought Blood Meridian and will hopefully be reading by the end of the month. I only read The Road as I was learning Norwegian, so I'll have to grab it in English at some point. I find it quite difficult to balance my academic reading from fiction though. I find that I often don't have the energy or time to read fiction compared to all the bricks I have to read for work.

I will endure. Perseverance is the root of all victory.

I just finished the second part, which was shorter than the first and generally easier to follow. Not easier to read, mind you, but easier to follow. Focused, relatively clear and obvious plot movement. Apart from the spy man dressed as an octopus, nothing obvious about that.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings. It's a very entertaining and easy read so far. My only complaint, and it's very minor and involves a minor character:

It's been so long since I've even tried reading something, for whatever reason... But I wanna know if anyone could suggest some kinda experimental horror reading, especially extra "visual" stuff (awesomely depicted and unusual imagery) if possible.

Lookin for inspiration a bit but I also just got a sudden hankering for some good old reading, and my personal catalogue of things I've read is admittedly kinda small.

If it means anything I do already know and love a vast chunk of Lovecraft

Well Thomas Ligotti is the obvious suggestion, but you may have already heard of him.

Clive Barker's Damnation game has some really unique imagery.

Matheson's Hell House. One of those rare effective horror novels. Lots of macabre imagery. Along with Blatty's The Exorcist and Lewis' The Monk (two more great horror works) it's probably the only book to elicit a visceral reaction from me

So, don't take this the wrong way, but the comment about GR got me thinking about books I actually have left unfinished. I'm confident GR will not join my personal ranks of unfinished books---I'm halfway through and generally enjoying it---but I thought maybe some people here might want to share what books they never completed, and why. I'll start with the ones I remember off the top of my head.



Stephen King, Night Shift: not a story but a collection of short stories. I read some of them and liked them, some I didn't care at all for. I don't know, there were just too many duds in a row I guess. What is even the point of "Captain Trips," anyway? Nothing happens, it reads like a fragment of a chapter from The Stand he discarded (okay, so there's some people conversing on a post-apocalyptic beach and...).

Stephen King & Peter Straub, The Talisman: I think I got maybe 50-60 pages in and was just incredibly bored. I don't remember exactly, it was 10+ years ago.

Robert Jordan, Wheel of Time/The Eyes of the World: I picked up the first book in the series on the recommendation of a college classmate. I don't think I realized at the time it was such a huge series, and the prospect of interfering with my coursework readings made me reconsider. I think I got about halfway through the first book---it was around the time some guy learns he can talk to dogs or wolves---before setting it aside. I had started to get bored anyway, and then the author died before finishing the series so I never picked it back up.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road: as previously discussed, his punctuation really threw me off and I just didn't have time to read for fun alongside all my coursework at the time, so I set it aside.


Of those, I'm most confidant I'll give the McCarthy one another go at some point, and possibly the King story collection. I know Talisman along with its sequel is strongly connected to his Dark Tower novels but I think I'd rather read a summary at this point. The Wheel of Time book, looking back, seems pretty forgettable, and it sounds like the series gets outright terrible later on (plus he never finished it, so...).

Overall I guess I didn't finish books mostly because of boredom, and also being busy with schoolwork at the time. Plus one whose writing style I just outright disliked. How about the rest of the MA Inklings?

Yeah don't bother with the first Wheel of Time book. I slogged through it in audiobook format, and it just wasn't good. Very very slow-paced, super obvious foreshadowing and bad decisions by characters (hey, that obvious cursed knife is probably a good thing to take and then not tell anyone about), SUPER DUPER Tolkien ripoffs, basically everything you'd expect from its reputation.

The one actual point I did like was how rural village life was depicted - the petty politics, the general ignorance of the outside world, the way a fuckin' bard made everyone SUPER EXCITED, as well as the one traveling merchant who actually has news from elsewhere. He did a good job of showing how small their lives are and how devoid of excitement. After that, though, YUCK.

I think the only novel I've ever decided to set aside was David Eddings' Pawn of Prophecy. It was for a course where you had to read two novels and write an essay on the parallels. I couldn't finish the fucking thing even though it was obligatory, so I wrote what I could based on how far I was able to make it. Complete garbage that mocks the intellect of the reader no matter the age. The other novel was the first Harry Potter, which almost seemed like good literature in comparison.

^Stuff like that and WoT, which are very popular but also have mediocre reputations, made me generally leery of fantasy for a long time. Whenever I walk by the sci-fi/fantasy section of a bookstore and see all these large tomes with fantastical sword-bearing men and women on the cover I can't help but wonder how many of them are "romance/chick lit for boys," so to speak. Obviously I know a few are more well-regarded than others (Martin, Moorcock, Erikson, Le Guin), but in comparison to sci-fi or horror it seems like there are fewer fantasy works with both popular and critical recognition outside the die-hard genre enthusiasts. Or at least that's true for post-Tolkien fantasy. I'll probably check out more fantasy at some point but I've got a bunch of sci-fi to read first.

Ilwhyan, I didn't even think of books I had to read for coursework. There were a few I didn't finish or "finished" but mostly just skimmed through while taking notes on a few sections that seemed important, more so in high-school than in college, as most college course reading is nonfiction. I also didn't have to do much math in college for my my major which left more time for reading; math is the bane of my brain and in high school always cut into my other homework time. Though in one case I remember I intentionally didn't finish a book (The Great Train Robbery) for a high-school assignment because I thought the text was actively annoying.

I'm not sure how I'd feel if I went back and read it now, but basically I thought the first WoT book was decent enough. Just okay, beach reading type stuff or whatever they call it, with some boring bits and some more exciting parts. That said, every one of failsafeman's criticisms is 100% accurate, and each book in the series is at least twice as bad as the one before it. Somehow I made it to book seven or eight or something like that. Each book is just sooooooooo fucking long and 90% filled with the most hateful, forgettable, irritating copy-pasted archetype characters that are impossible to keep track of doing super boring shit that you don't care about at all (mainly gossiping with one another about stupid pointless things). Every vaguely interesting element that gets added gets completely shat on by hundreds of pages of boring nothing and actively irritating things added at an exponential rate. Read this series if you completely hate yourself.

I mean, the first Wheel of Time book wasn't GODAWFUL, I did finish it after all. For me it was a 3-star book if we're going by the Goodreads system, except most books I give 3 stars are good at first and then fuck up horribly at some point, whereas WoT was just kinda 3 stars throughout. It's just really long and you could probably read 2-3 much better books in the same amount of time. Even the "turn your brain off entertainment" category has much better books in it. Like anything by Matthew Reilly!

Knowing that none of the shitloads of setup ever pays off in later books makes it even less worthwhile, though.

I'm currently halfway through The Great Zoo of China, by Matthew Reilly. It's basically "Jurassic Park WITH FUCKING DRAGONS, YO", and the plot acts as little more than a set up for lots of fast paced action. This isn't the kind of book I usually read, as I generally go for fantasy novels with lots of cool world building and short horror stories, but it's still pretty good for what it is. The writing is trim and sleek, wasting basically no time with anything that doesn't keep you glued to the pages and with just the right amount of exposition to provide relatively plausible reasons as for why everything is happening. I especially like the amount of work that went into researching the biology of the dragons, with the result being creatures that, while clearly different to anything exists or has existed in our world, still have enough parallels to real world predators that they don't sound entirely unbelievable either. So yeah, I hope he can keep up the craziness to the end, because I'm having fun with this.

Also, dude has, like, a boner for explosions. For real.

Really enjoying this so far:

I haven't read any of his fantasy, but Ice Station was a really good, really stupid action novel that reads like a mix of Tom Clancy and Michael Bay at their guilty-pleasure best. Reilly's characterization and dialog is about on the level of a 12-year-old, but he's actually really good at action set pieces. It's not just "and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens." He'll set a bunch of things up well beforehand, where you KNOW it's all going to come into play at some point, but then he'll wait and wait and finally bring out the big guns to make a climactic scene EVEN MORE climactic. And then do it again. And again. It's very intricately paced and set up where each payoff comes at just the right moment to heighten the tension. Oh but wait, remember those killer whales he mentioned before? Now they're back and THEY'RE EATING EVERYONE. And there's a bomb. And then remember that person acting suspiciously before? They're a traitor! And them too! And then the SAS show up!!!!! And man-eating mutant seals!!!!

It's a fun novel.

Oi, The Great Zoo of China isn't really fantasy. It's pretty much a sci fi story about man's hubris a la Jurassic Park, as the dragons are a fully scientific phenomenon and there isn't even a hint of the supernatural in it (or, at least, there hasn't been any so far). I have to agree about his dialog and characters being really basic though, as I could describe the latter as "badass herpetologist lady" or "dudebro photographer" or "shady government dude" and you wouldn't be missing a thing. But yeah, it doesn't matter because the set pieces are just fantastic. The man has such a mastery of Chekhov's gun that not a single thing he introduces into the story ends up being unaccounted for. No filler, all killer indeed.

I should probably pick up Ice Station after being done with this. Sounds pretty... cool

Oh, well he has written fantasy too, Troll Mountain for example. A Michael Crichton type story would make perfect sense for him too, though. Also fuck you and your puns.

I finished Gene Wolfe's 'A Borrowed Man' the other day. I'm not sure how many people have read it, so I won't go too far into it. I had been looking through the sci-fi on the library's website, found this, and I enjoyed it. As usual, it's written in the first person, and plot twists and dramatic events occur in an almost off hand way; they just slide right by or he decides not to go into it for one reason or another. He's so good at picking a style and sticking to it, or rather defining a clear reason that the person either talks, thinks, or writes the way that they are, even though the reader might not find that out until the end. It's like he deliberately refuses to give the reader what they think they want (sex, fights, etc.) and includes exclusively the information that the main character is including for his own contextual reasons, and according to their individual personality, which he is able to keep consistent. The book doesn't seem to have much of a message, per se, and frankly I don't think it even needs one; it's an interesting, smoothly-told story that's easy to read -- basically a disarmingly fluid take on a fairly classic detective story format done in first person sci-fi. Not exactly challenging, but definitely interesting.

In comparison, I had recently read Pohl's 'Syzygy' which I also found interesting. I enjoy Pohl's choice to write from the point of view of different characters whose lives intersect, but who don't necessarily know what the other is thinking or even communicate particularly often. It gives the world a surprisingly rich feel. I also enjoy how he manages to provide a kind of "living by example" version of making a point or providing some kind of commentary. He doesn't really do it explicitly, but it's hard to feel like he isn't trying to do so all the same; he just doesn't bang you over the head with the specifics. It's a story after all, and the reader is left to do a lot of the thinking for themselves. I enjoy work that's substantial and has social commentary built into the general engine, but manages to remain entertaining and avoid being pedantic. He's not the best at dialogue, but I liked the story all the same.

I've not yet read A Borrowed Man, but Wolfe's most recent novels have all sort of followed the same pattern - new protagonist, relatively simple story, fairly easy read. I'm fine with that. Home Fires was near the bottom of Wolfe's oeuvre, An Evil Guest was THE bottom, but The Sorcerer's House was excellent and deceptively complex. I don't think Wolfe is going to write another "classic" work, but he clearly still has quality novels in him.

I am now approaching the end of Gravity's Rainbow---barely a hundred pages left. I was just treated to a quasi-chapter told almost exclusively from the perspective of a light-bulb, named Byron. Byron recounts his (???) two-decade life on the run from the light-bulb cartel, who are upset that he hasn't burned out yet and as such is cutting into their light-bulb sale profit margins. Byron the Bulb tries to convince other light-bulbs to launch a war against the cartel using various flashing and strobing techniques but is unsuccessful. Byron despairs. Byron apparently uses these subtle strobing techniques to subconsciously convince a barber to slit an American colonel's throat for no apparent reason.

This section tested my patience.

Where should I start with Ligotti?

I gotta finish Oryx and Crake first but after that.

Teatro Grottesco is a great collection and is, more importantly, readily available.

I'm about a third of my way through "The Plot to Scapegoat Russia" and it's been rather eye-opening. The title is self-explanatory -- it's about the propaganda machine of the U.S. and how it's been selling wars to the general public since the Cold War era, the USSR/Russia being the proverbial boogeyman in many instances.

Since I've last posted I (deep breath) finished Gravity's Rainbow. I could have done with a more resolute ending ---and to be honest, I would not have understood what happened to Slothrop if I hadn't looked it up online---but I guess it's more about the trip than the destination with that particular literary hallucination. Emphasis on the word "trip."

I guess it is a testament to how thoroughly difficult that book is that in the two weeks since I've finished it I've finished 2.9 other novels. I'm on the last 20 or so pages of Left Hand of Darkness now, after which it will be a full 3 books. Each of which read like a young adult novel after Pynchon's prose.

This Le Guin book was so intriguing during the first three chapters that I sought out another book of hers before I was halfway through this one.

Just keep in mind that The Left Hand of Darkness is one of her very best novels, and not many of her others are in that league. I don't know what else you got by her but if you go in expecting something as good as Left Hand you'll be disappointed.

Not to say she hasn't written plenty of other good stuff.

I figured I'd go with the other multiple-award-winner and got The Dispossessed.

Oh yeah, I really liked that one. It's similar to Left Hand in that it's also a political metaphor on an alien planet, but with the introduction of an anarchist isolationist state existing on the moon. It's a fascinating (if somewhat depressing) story about how societies and individuals will exploit and leverage knowledge for power even under ideal circumstances, in large part because no one is willing to admit that something else might come along that's bigger than their own personal goals (or those dictated by their society). However it's told through a very human perspective, which keeps the dry subject matter interesting and relatable. You'll probably appreciate it more than most people since you're already very interested in/knowledgeable regarding politics and systems of government.

Yeah, obviously everyone talks about the gender/sex thing with Left Hand but as of chapter 19 at any rate that's less of a focus than the political differences between the nations of Karhide and Orgoreyn, at least in terms of what drives the plot. It's all quite fascinating. Good to know I can expect something somewhat similar.

Yeah the gender thing is what it's known for but it's really just more of a background theme/cool worldbuilding detail than a central theme. Great book either way.

Could I get a rec for authors like R.A. Salvatore? I really have been enjoying \his work.