Nice...is the Sturgeon book one that you've read before?Quoting Daniel Davis (view post)
I recently got "Some of Your Blood".
Nice...is the Sturgeon book one that you've read before?
I recently got "Some of Your Blood".
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
No - I've only read The Dreaming Jewels and some of his short stories. I've heard that More Than Human is brilliant though - some people put it up there with Bester's The Demolished Man as a premier example of literary sci-fi.
I just ordered the first collection of Sturgeon's short stories. There are 11 collections available, each around 400 pages long. I think I am prepared to dive head first into Sturgeon's work, and I am glad he left us with a large body of great material.
You posted the cover for Some of Your Blood, right? I think that is what sparked my memory today when I was in the book store. I couldn't think of what to look for, but then the name "Sturgeon" flashed into my mind.
Hey meg, you may want to check out this site:
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi
It's pretty awesome.
My favorites would go something like:
Walden - Thoreau
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce
The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoevsky
On the Road - Kerouac
Dune - Herbert
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche
Fifth Business - Davies
In the Skin of a Lion - Ondaatje
The Lorax - Dr. Seuss
Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
Moby Dick - Melville
Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut
The Stranger - Camus
Fear and Trembling - Kierkegaard
That's what comes to mind immediately.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice...di d you read other books in the series? albeit fifth business is the best, the other two are worth checking out as well. davies is fast becoming another favorite writer of mine. anybody must read his collection of ghost stories.
to me, he is very mythical. i know i like him, but can't ever put my finger down what exactly in his style that enchants me.
i want to check out more of his stuffs. which one do you recommend?
I've also read The Manticore. I liked that one a lot as well, but thought it got caught up too much in its Jungian psychology. Whereas the integration of saints in Fifth Business works on that mythical level you're talking about, the Jungian archetypes in The Manticore were more analytical. The melancholy is still there, but not the miraculousness that pervades Fifth Business.
For other posters, I really can't recommend Fifth Business enough. Robertson Davies is Canadian and doesn't get a ton of international attention, but he definitely deserves it.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
How much Proust have you read? I've considered starting In Search of Lost Time, but I just can't seem to build up the courage to undertake something so daunting.
right on with manticore. won't really recommend you world of wonder though since it's the weakest link. unless of course you are a completist, or have a strong desire to know who killed boy stauston. (drum rolling.) not a bad read, just too long. besides eisengrim's probably my least favorite character which is strange because by trade he should be the most interesting one. i like lisle, but the last book doesn't really do justice to her.
i own lyre of orpheus and will read it some day.
i somehow forgot Crime and Punishment, The Stranger, Tender is the Night, and Love in the Time of Cholera, among others I'm sure.
From those of his I read I favoured The Rebel Angels.
*nods*
I've read only Combray so far (the first half of Swann's Way). It's not that it's bad, but I'm seriously considering moving on to something else. I'm interested in the family relationships, but Proust spends way too much time talking about architecture and flowers.
I enjoyed Swann's Way. Was kinda like being enveloped in borrowed nostalgia.
Damn, I can't count how many times I've walked around a bookstore with this in my hand and last minute put it back.
*puts it on "to read next" list*
*chuckles*
How I've missed you 'round these parts!
I just looked this up and I'm intrgued. I haven't been disappointed by a book reccomendation from this place yet, so I'm putting it next on my list.
*votes Rebel Angels*
Solar Lottery (1955) - Philip K. Dick
Ted Bentley is a loyal company man, and he's just lost his job. Disillusioned with his station in life, he travels to one of the directorate Hills and swears fealty to Reese Verrick, the Quizmaster, the supreme ruler of the universe. Unfortunately for Bentley, seconds after his fealty-pledge is complete, the bottle twitches and Verrick is removed from power, replaced by Quizmaster Cartwright. When Verrick leaves his position of power, he takes with him all those who have pledged fealty to him, they are his subjects, he is their lord, their protector. Pledging loyalty to a person might grant the serf more rewards, but if Bentley had, instead, pledged loyalty to the general Quizmaster position he would at least still have a government job. Now he finds himself the pawn in the M-game, a game of probability and statistics, assassination and telepaths.
In order to combat the rampant telepathic abilities of the populace, the universe in Dick's Solar Lottery, is governed by randomness. Promotions, luxuries, necessities, it's all dispersed in random fashion, a grand, universal lottery system. Because the telepaths are able to “teep” the outcome of rational and probable events, extreme randomness and uncertainty is injected into every-day living. While the government sees this randomness as a rational solution to the telepath problem, and even uses a Corp of telepaths to help predict the outcome of these random twitches, it has inadvertently fostered an irrational society, one that relies heavily upon good luck charms, ignorant pledges of loyalty in which the serfs bank on the luck of their chosen lord, and extreme social isolation.
Solar Lottery is Dick's first published book, and it shows. While the ideas contained within are bright and imaginative, the young author has trouble keeping everything in its place. Some might argue that Dick suffered from similar problems on subsequent novels, but here his gonzo style makes things a bit too difficult to follow, and he looses track of more than a few sub-plots. Sometimes a lost sub-plot can be forgiven, but here Dick choses to end the book on one with little-to-no relevance to anything that has come before. This is a total shame because the previous hundred or so pages are quite thrilling. While later in his career Dick would learn to juggle the multitude of characters with which his books are populated, in Solar Lottery he fails to give too many of the characters enough time for the reader to gage their importance and personalties.
I don't mean to be too harsh on Dick here. There are some great things to recommend in Solar Lottery. It is clearly a blue-print for the later work of Masmune Shirow, and while reading the book I couldn't help but flash onto images of Black Magic M-66 and Ghost in the Shell. While I have never thought of PKD as a cyberpunk author, it is easy to see that his work helped to shape that genre's conventions. With a group of characters who jack in to a Matrix-like construct, taking turns controlling the body of an unwilling android, and a plot that deals with minmax probability and world-spanning corporations vying for political power, Dick's work here has clearly influenced the work of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.
I recommend this book only to those who have already taken the plunge into PKD's world. While there are some interesting things going on underneath the book's surface, there just isn't enough good material beyond the book's historical context. I think it is always a good idea to trace an artist's roots, to see where he has been, so one might gain further insight into his other works. In this light, I appreciate the time I spent with Solar Lottery even if I didn't fully enjoy the novel itself.
Favorites:
1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851
2. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky, 1880
3. Being & Time, Heidegger, 1927
4. Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
5. Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky, 1864
6. The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner, 1929
7. Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky, 1866
8. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1885
9. Hunger, Knut Hamsun, 1890
10. Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges, 1944
11. Jacques the Fatalist, Denis Diderot, 1796
12. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1902
13. The Trial, Franz Kafka, 1922
14. Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1960
15. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, 1767
16. Pan, Hamsun, 1894
17. The Crocodile, Dostoevsky, 1865
18. The Outsider, Camus, 1942
19. The Seducer’s Diary, Kierkegaard, 1843
20. The Bacchae, Euripides, 406 BC
21. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954
22. Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1938
23. Lolita, Nabokov, 1955
24. Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1600
25. The Double, Dostoevsky, 1846
26. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford, 1914
27. Pierre, or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville, 1852
28. Madame Bovary, Flaubert, 1857
29. King James Bible: Ecclesiastes the Preacher, 250 BC
30. The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam (trans. E. Fitzgerald), 1120 (1859)
31. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 1861
32. 1984, George Orwell, 1949
33. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, 1930
34. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1924
35. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
36. The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot, 1917
37. The Aeneid, Virgil (trans. Dryden), 19 BC (1697)
38. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, 1914
39. Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 1952
40. Collected Stories of H. P. Lovecraft, 1917-1935
41. A Christmas Carol, Dickens, 1843
42. Medea, Euripides, 431 BC
43. Season of Migration to the North, Salih, 1966
44. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, 1940
45. The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852
That's a great write-up, D.
It sounds interesting, but I do think I will wait and read that one later. I still have "VALIS" on my shelf, and I would like to read some stuff like "Martian Time-Slip", "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said", "The Man in the High Castle", "Vulcan's Hammer"...the list goes on
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
Oh yes - all of those must come first. Solar Lottery is definitely not a PKD priority.That's a great write-up, D.
It sounds interesting, but I do think I will wait and read that one later. I still have "VALIS" on my shelf, and I would like to read some stuff like "Martian Time-Slip", "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said", "The Man in the High Castle", "Vulcan's Hammer"...the list goes on
I just bought his collected fictions yesterday. I'm pretty sure it includes every piece of fiction he wrote. I haven't read anything by him yet.
Forgot about this one. Definitely on my list as well.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
If it's the same edition that I have, then it's divided up into the different collections that were published independently. Everything in Ficciones is amazing. The other collections are pretty good, but they pale in comparison.
How do people on here feel about Samuel Beckett?
I have had two good friends from class harping on and on about his trilogy of "Molloy", "Mallone Dies" and "The Unnamable" - both saying it was one of the best things they'd ever read.
"All right, that's too hot. Anything we can do about that heat?"
"Rick...it's a flamethrower."
i only watched godot which i find inspiring. but when it comes to absurdist playwright, i prefer albee. never read his novels or shorts though.
That sounds like mine. Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition is what I bought. Seemed like a good deal.
Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.
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