Finished the second part of Book of the New Sun the other day.Quoting D_Davis (view post)
Finished the second part of Book of the New Sun the other day.
Are you liking it? I was a bit underwhelmed by it, but I want to read it again this year to see if it does anything more for me. It was a victim of it's own popularity. I was expecting life shattering experience, something truly remarkable, and what I got was something very good.
I am liking it though I agree it's not a life shattering experience (possibly partly because I've already read later writers that take high fantasy even further into left field). Wolfe is really good at packing his narrative with odd bits of world building and weird set-pieces while keeping the books quite lean.
Definitely not without its problems though, not the least of which is the Game of Thronesy fantasy sexism/wish fulfillment.
Same for me. I had already been exposed to authors who were inspired by Wolfe (namely Cisco and McDermot), and who expanded upon what Wolfe had done.
There are definitely some images that have stuck with me, though.
Half way through The Knight, and it is tremendous. Liking it a lot more than Book of the New Sun. This is totally my kind of fantasy - poetic, weird, and overflowing with mythology, and it totally embraces its genre conventions all while Wolfe deftly subverts them. It's fantasy for people who love fantasy, but who also yearn for something with more nuance and symbolism in their quest adventures. And it's also, not surprisingly, incredibly well written. It's sometimes easy to forget that Wolfe is such a great writer, but with each page I am reminded of the fact that he is.
Gene Wolfe has the uncanny ability to predict exactly what I'm thinking. Every time I think about a certain character or event, wondering what happened to them/it because they/it haven't/hasn't been mentioned in awhile, they/it reappear(s), and usually one of the main characters will make a comment about that thing being forgotten or lost for awhile. Because this entire narrative seems to be some kind of deconstruction of the fantasy genre, I'm wondering if Wolfe is doing this as a kind of jab at lesser, pop-fantasy authors who often forget about plot threads and characters in their massive, never ending series. I feel like this is a book that should be studied as much as it is read. I'm really getting a lot out of it - it's the perfect book for me right now.
Almost done with The Knight, and I'll probably move straight on to The Wizard. I really wish something like this could enjoy the same success and popularity as ASOIAF does. The depth of mythology and symbolism and its full embrace of the fantastic and weird, coupled with Wolfe's masterful command of the English language, makes for a spectacular read; it's as well written as any book I've ever read, and contains some absolutely gorgeous passages. I don't like it as much as Last Dragon (still my landmark of literary fantasy), but it's up there. I'd love to see this kind of fantasy get the television and cinema treatment.
I'm reading Strange Things and Stranger Places, one of his collections, and yeah, all I can offer up is a big fat "meh." The situations are sometimes clever, although this collection skews in favor of classic horror tropes like the mummy, the frankenstein monster, and so on. But I've been trying to figure out why nothing's working for me, since the pieces all seem to be there. The circumstances, the escalation, the Lovecraftian leave-the-story-peaking endings.
I think the big thing is that his prose is so soft and doughy. Example:
This sentence offers almost no sense of disruption. "Oh, I meant to, but there was this whole thing." There's a passive streak to everything, in terms of how long he takes to say things, and how poor he is at making them vivid. Also, he wrote this sentence.
"Lingeringly." What. Who would ever. And why. Ugh.
The ending of the series is magnificent.
Finished Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill. Think I liked it a bit more than Horns. A little warmer, a little more hope. Between the two books, the guy has a real interest in how past sins overshadow our present. More heavily explored in Horns, but present as well in Box. Trying to decide if I'll do Locke and Key or NOS4A2 next. He's talented.
Starting now on The Island of Dr. Moreau and Forever Odd, the sequel to Odd Thomas, a book I enjoyed despite myself.
I've actually been curious about these. They sound interesting, but Koontz....man, I just can't bring myself to read him.
Not a fan, eh? I liked him as a teenager during my gobble-up-all-horror phase, but I didn't read a thing of his for maybe 7 or 8 years. Read Odd Thomas at the behest of my father and didn't hate it, although the prose was pretty hackneyed. It helped that an EW article a number of years ago essentially called him out for his absurd, tacky prose and suggested he was a satirist in disguise, which he agreed with in a letter to the editor (which might've been a Wiseau-ian ass-cover).
Listening to Forever Odd (book on CD), there was already one bit where I laughed out loud at a tedious paragraph that kept describing a man in terms of a snake and capped with: "Before he could think of another serpentine analogy, the snaky man attacked." The snaky man! Hah! God almighty...
I always found Koontz to be a guy who could come up with an interesting story and some good characters, but couldn't come up with an ending to save his life.
I've read maybe 5 of his books. Of those 5, 3 of them were genuinely intriguing, but not 1 of them had a decent finale.
I don't really have any interest in reading more of his work.
Same thing goes for Peter Straub, almost verbatim.
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
Same. Full disclosure, this was also an issue of "what's available on audio CD at the library."
Yep. It was eh. Yelchin was good as odd, but the short runtime made the book's wackiness too wacky. Slipped past the event horizon of acceptable wacky. Then again, Stephen Sommers, so there ya go. Interesting monster design.
[]
Started reading Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy this morning, with the first book Annihilation. It is awesome.
First things first - this is how you release a series. Back, to back, to back. The entire trilogy is done, and all the books are releasing within the same freaking year. Authors and publishers take note. DO NOT START PUBLISHING a series until it is done and the author can deliver each subsequent volume in a timely manner.
On with the book. So far it's a combination of Roadside Picnic and At the Mountains of Madness. Now, that is of course a reductive comparison, but an apt one to wet the appetite of readers into those kinds of stories. It is also a testament to VanderMeer's writing and imagination that these two similar works come to mind.
It's a story about exploring a weird place.
It focuses on four female protagonists: The Biologist, The Surveyor, The Psychologist, and The Anthropologist. The narrative is told from the POV of the Biologist, and details the group's expedition into an alien area known only as Area X. Many, countless expeditions have gone into Area X to explore for a governing agency, and something has happened to each. Sometimes the groups of people disappear, and then reappear back in their normal lives without any explanation. Sometimes even more mysterious things happens. Not much is clear. What is clear is that there are two levels of study going on - the group of women are exploring Area X, and the government agency is studying the effect of the area on the women.
Really looking forward to the rest.
These have been recommended to me pretty much daily on Amazon. Guess I'll have to check them out!
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
Is anyone here familiar with the Algernon Blackwood short story, The Willows (or any of his other work)? I read it during my undergraduate studies a few years ago and I was really struck by the sense of mounting, enveloping dread and the distinctly achieved horror. It's a remarkably creepy story. It was unlike anything else I had ever read and it is still one of the most unnerving pieces of fiction I have come across.
It also received H.P. Lovecraft's imprimatur:
S.T. Joshi prepared a new Blackwood anthology that was released in May of this year. I'm going to pick that up as soon as possible.
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